


Give & Take

by jonphaedrus



Series: Give and Take Universe [2]
Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Complete, Give & Take, M/M, give and take
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-18
Updated: 2012-11-27
Packaged: 2017-11-16 13:11:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 59,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/539791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/pseuds/jonphaedrus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s a lot to a relationship. There’s a give and a take, a pull and a push. And sometimes, just when you think you’ve lost it all, a little bit can go a long way.</p><p>The Lieutenant finds Amon half-dead after Tarrlok explodes their boat, and nurses him back to health. They’re a long way from what they were, but that doesn’t really matter, because they’ve started to become something else. Something better.</p><p>It’s a hard road, and they’ve got a long way to walk—but wherever they go, they’re going together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theslowestdrawfag](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=theslowestdrawfag).



There is something about falling in love, they say, that makes a man crazy. And you know, I kind of have to believe it. You start out high as a kite, and generally by the end of whatever it is that you fell in love with, you end up broken. That's just how it goes.

 

Once, a seventeen year old kid asked me what it was to be in love. He'd just had his leg broken in a motorcycle accident, and was sitting in our infirmary, staring at his hands. I had been there, I had carried him back to base.

 

_Lieutenant,_ he asked me, looking up, with haunted eyes. _Have you ever fallen in love?_ And for a long time, I just stared at him. It had to have made him pretty damn uncomfortable to just have me watching him, uniform and all, behind my goggles, and I guess it was because I was trying to figure out how to answer.

 

_Yes._ I said at last. He looked a bit surprised. _Why?_

 

_Mei Yi._ The kid mumbled. The name of the other Equalist who had been on the other bike. She had been killed in the crash—killed when the Avatar had thrown up a wall of stone. We had salvaged her body but nothing else. It would be buried in the morning. _She—we went to school together. I joined because of her._ He swallowed around a lump in his throat. _Her family was killed by the Triad a couple of years ago—she—my parents always treated her like another kid. She moved in with us._ He set his hands down and leaned his head back on the pillow, looked over at me. _I was going to ask her to marry me._

 

_You're a bit young to get married,_ I pointed out, and he shrugged minutely.

 

_I figured we could die any day now._ I could see the sadness in his eyes, the emptiness, like part of his soul had been scooped out and left to fry on the rocks. The words seemed like venom as they dripped from his lips. _I guess I was right._ It was quiet for another long moment, and then I leaned back in the chair next to his bed, reaching up and pulling off my mask, turning it over in my hands, looking at the glinting goggles, the tight cloth, and I rubbed at my chin. I needed a shower and a shave.

 

_I have, actually._ I looked up at him. _Just once. When I was twenty years old, this kid—not a day older than you—got hit by a Satomobile. He crashed into me while I was buying a kebab at a stand. Broke his ankle and three ribs, and one of mine._ He looked a bit surprised. But we were Equalists—everybody was equal, even if some of us still looked askance at that sort of thing.

 

_What happened to him?_ The kid said at last.

 

_I was in love at first sight,_ I replied. And then I stood. _I still am._ Standing in the doorway, leaning on one post, was the kid who, twenty-three years before, had gotten hit by a car. His grey eyes watched me from within the slits of his mask, beneath the shadow of his hood.

 

I couldn't see it, but I knew. He was smiling.

 

—— Chapter One : ——

_Was ever book containing such vile matter_

_So fairly bound? O that deceit should dwell_

_In such a gorgeous palace!_

_[ Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene ii ]_

 

There is something about heartbreak. It's physically painful, yes, but only in the aftermath. At the moment it happens itself, it isn't painful to your body. Instead it's like this yawning, gaping hole in your soul. Especially when it's someone you have known for more than half their life. Someone you trust with your back, and they trust you with theirs. Especially when you have seen them through every emotion, every end of the spectrum. After twenty-three years, I had seen Amon elated and soaring on clouds, in the darkest of moods, so angry that he could have lit you on fire with his eyes, defeated, exhausted, vindicated, helpless, broken, and strong. And I thought I knew everything about him that there was to know.

 

I had never questioned some things—I didn't want to. I never questioned where he came from. What his past was. And in return, he never questioned mine. For all intents and purposes, we were brand new people from day one, healer's office, Watertribe seventeen year old getting lectured by a healer to avoid cars and streets from now on, all right?

 

I don't think it ever occurred to him that I would have loved him no matter what, if he had just told me. Avatar Korra accusing him of being a Bloodbender, that I could handle—we would talk about it later, intensely, in private, and he would either substantiate or refute her claims, and either way, I knew he would give me a good explanation. He had never failed at that. Besides, that's what trust is about. Even when in the face of all sorts of hell, when it's an established thing, you _trust._ Sometimes it's the only thing between you and the sharks.

 

I could handle him actually being a Bloodbender, too. Hell, it made a lot of sense. And in all the years I had known him, Amon had never once used it to do something as evil as the stories of Yakone or Hama made it out to be. He had used it, as far as I knew, only to bring equality. And I trusted him to, at the end, let his own bending go as well. Because he didn't need it.

 

What I couldn't handle was the _lying._ When you love somebody, you don't lie. You don't gloss over the truth, or never even talk about it. You say it, even when it hurts, and then you let hindsight take the hindmost. You plough right on through anyway. Burn your bridges, build new ones. And I could have handled the truth just fine, if it had been given to me. I couldn't handle the lying.

 

That was the thing, though. Amon _had_ lied to me. Pretty badly, actually. And when I walked in on him, Bloodbending the Avatar and (her boyfriend?) her sidekick, that was where the heartbreak started. It started like this burning behind my eyes of fresh-brewing tears. 

 

Because I had. I _had_ dedicated my life to him. My life, my soul, my body, my mind. And he, in turn, had done the same. Or so I thought. Not as completely as I did for him, oh no. That's the thing about being the Lieutenant. You were always secondary. But the Leader always gave something in return, and outside of the Equalists, we were still on even ground. Nobody is the leader in a relationship, even if for the past fifteen years I had been giving the mile and he had been giving the inch. I hadn't _minded._ I loved him.

 

We fought for the same causes. He put his mile into that. It was a trade off. And there was no doubt, not in anybody's mind, without Amon to rally behind, we never would have gotten anywhere. The Equalists would have died in a shitty apartment in a crappy slum in the worst neighbourhood in Republic City if it weren't for a twenty-three year old from the Water tribe who was as stubborn as a brick wall sometimes.

 

And I knew even in that moment, he didn't stop loving me. When I caught him, after he attacked the Avatar and Friend, the look Amon gave me was one I had seen in his eyes maybe twice before—absolute, unbridled terror. Fear. Anxiety. And he reacted with whatever was at hand.

 

Honestly. I had told him fifteen years before—I would never attack him. Never. I wouldn't betray him, I wouldn't leave him, I wouldn't break his heart. I would _never_ attack him. No matter how far down he fell or how high he climbed, I would never fight him. I would put my hand on his shoulder and bring him back to earth and be his voice of reason and caution and sanity. Like any good lover is supposed to do.

 

And in the end, he paid that back by crushing me half to hell, his fingers shaking as he said the words that broke my soul.

 

_You have served me well, Lieutenant._

 

Not Lieu. I know why he didn't say it—nobody knew my name, I wasn't traceable. Not even Hiroshi knew my real name—the Lieutenant moniker had picked up so fast that nobody had ever taken the time to figure out that it was really just a pretty flimsy cover for my real name. But it still felt like he had just torn everything we had in two.

 

And when he tossed me into that pile of beams, I didn't feel the need to get up. Or the want. Ever. I almost shouted his name when Firebender Brat threw him, hard, into the wall—Amon had never been as resilient as I was, he took injuries a lot harder, unlike I did, just walking them off—but he was back up before I could call his name.

 

He looked toward me for a moment. I saw that. Half-buried under beams as I was, I couldn't move, couldn't speak. But I heard his words, they carried.

 

_I'm sorry._

 

 

 

And so we came to this. The glass shattering—Spirits, I hoped he had landed in the water, that concrete wouldn't make for a good place to stop, and besides, as much as I hated the idea that he had lied to me, I had never been happier to know that my lover was a Waterbender—and I was still laying there.

 

Nobody came back to check if I was alive. Psh. Typical.

 

Twenty three years since Amon of the Water Tribe had been hit by a Satomobile, flew twenty feet, knocked over a kebab stand and crashed into me hard. Twenty years to the day since we made love slow and sweet by the light of the full moon in a dingy apartment, his fingers curled white-knuckled in the sheets and his voice hoarse as he called my name. Fifteen since we had tried to save a couple in a back alley, burned to hell by a Firebender, their squalling sons gone running just in time, and we had made a pact that this would never happen again, not under our watch. Thirteen since Amon had donned that mask, because a man corrupts a revolution, an idea strengthens it. Ten since Hiroshi Sato had shown up at our apartment in the middle of the night. Eight since we went to war. One since we had left the Underground behind and begun this whole bloody battle.

 

And never once had he mentioned it. Had it never occurred to Amon, the _idiot,_ that I was going to love him no matter what. That I would have believed him if he had just told me.

 

That I loved him, even now, and without any reservations, in the face of everything.

 

Honestly, I probably would have just laid there, collapsed and in excruciating pain on the ground forever if I hadn't started coughing blood. Before that, the only pain I had noticed was the broken heart that was beating in my chest, held together by two decades of unconditional love and sheer force of will and nothing else, but coughing brought everything else to the forefront. My broken ribs from when the Avatar's dog had knocked me off a cliff. My neck—probably bad whiplash. It felt like someone had punched my sternum in, and not to mention on top of all of that, I could feel the internal bleeding. My organs, twisted painfully out of shape.

 

"Thank you for the reassurance of your love and apology," I grunted to nobody in particular, since Amon was long gone at that point, slowly crawling my way out of the beams and then laying propped there on the ground, leaning on one elbow, feeling the kali sticks in the palms of my hands. I wasn't down for the count yet.

 

Well, I probably was. Broken bones and dislocations I could handle. Bruises, sprains, twists, concussions. That was all commonplace. But internal bleeding would kill me one way or another, whether I liked it or not.

 

I wondered, quietly to myself, if Amon had known what it was he was doing to me when he did it. Probably not. As stoic and controlled as he was, _I_ was the part of the relationship that worked well under pressure. When things got too heated he lost it, he acted on instinct, did what came to mind. And this had been particularly bad—he had gone the way his stress told him to.

 

Rolling to my side, coughing into the sleeve of my uniform, I dragged myself to my feet, clawing my way up the pole I had been leaning on until I was upright again, and I took a few hazy steps, almost dropping to the ground again before I regained my balanced and leaned there, doubled over, hacking until I coughed up a handful of blood, watched it drip to the floor, crimson on the tile.

 

What a hell of a way to go, organs crushed by the person that you loved most in the world. There was probably a metaphor in there somewhere, but I couldn't figure it out right now. Right now I needed to go, get out of here before everybody remembered what was going on, got the city back into shape, the boats arrived, the cops showed up. Metalbenders or not, I was going to get arrested if I stuck around. They had lost their chance at Amon, but I was the Lieutenant. I was still standing there, sticking around, looking like an idiot. I needed to get going.

 

Sheathing the kali sticks on my back, groaning as I straightened, one hand pressed to my abdomen, and bit back a grimace of pain and started walking. My mask, goggles crushed, lay on the ground—it was broken, no point going back for it—and I just kept going, out to the hallway.

 

At one end, the window was smashed. I stared out the glass, the shatter shaped like someone had gone flying through it. I felt a pang in my heart.

 

But there was nothing left there to salvage. As much as I loved Amon, or whatever his real name actually was, he had tried to kill me. In the long run, he probably had. I couldn't love him through that. 

 

There was no point in loving something that had so tremendously hurt you. 

 

In the time that it took me, limping, coughing every few steps, to drag myself out of the Pro-Bending Arena, the crowd had dispersed and the sun was just dipping past noon—I had never been happier to have scheduled a rally before noon did hit. Still in my uniform, there was no way I could get out of the city quickly. Fortunately, there was a safe house, a bolt hole, set up about five blocks away from the Arena.

 

We had used it the night before the Championship match. It was well stocked, since we hadn't used anything there the night that we stayed, and it was one of those reserved just for Amon. And me.

 

Avoiding crowds and the open streets as much as possible, my ribs aching, all my joints screaming with the way Amon had twisted them, a few most likely dislocated and relocated somewhere along the line, it took a lot longer than I would have liked to make my way to the safe house, unlocking it with the keys in my uniform pocket, stepping inside and bolting it closed behind me.

 

It was a dingy apartment, like most of our other safe houses were. Two changes of clothes in the closet, both plain and civilian, a cloth bag to carry anything we needed in. Plus some provisions, all canned, and medical supplies. Just the bare minimum of all. Stripping off my uniform as soon as I was in the door, hissing every time I had to bend or turn, wincing at the persistent pain in my chest, I tossed the uniform in a heap on the end of the futon and pulled open the closet.

 

Two changes of clothes looked back at me. One was meant to fit me, taken from our closet at home. Vest, shirt, slacks, and a pair of shoes that were old but I could walk in. They probably didn't fit as well now as they had ten years ago, but I could deal with any foot pain. They would let me walk.

 

But first, bandaging. I couldn't put any pressure on any of my internal injuries, but I could replace the ripped up bandages on my ribs and the splints, which would hopefully keep the pressure at least partially under control.

 

Taking the first aid kit from the closet and sitting down on the futon to change my bandages—which was very awkward to do one handed, last time it had happened I had sat there on the bed while we had discussed an update to the uniform design, sketching it on my lap while Amon finished up changing the bandages and splints, offering advice over my shoulder—I glanced over at the length of it, my crumpled uniform on the other side. Last time I had been on this futon we had crammed on here, two fully grown men shoved into enough room for one, legs tangled, Amon half on top of me, one arm thrown over my chest, shoved as close as he could get to keep either one of us from sliding off the edge, and when we awoke early the morning of the Championship match, we had made love in the soft morning light through the still-parted blinds.

 

He had ridden me. I could still see his face, dark hair falling over his skin, grey-blue eyes half closed, a dark flush on his cheeks, lips parted, watching me from under lowered lids, whispering my name every time I filled him. Something inside me twisted, and I looked away, finished with the bandages.

 

Now was not the time to think about that. I dumped the kit into the bag for whenever I would need to patch myself up again and went back to the closet for the clothes.

 

Changing, and then hesitating once I was dressed—the other pair of clothes was meant for Amon, but I grabbed it anyway, wrapped my generator up in it, tucked it into the travelling bag,  and then went through the kitchen—a few packets of tightly wrapped noodles, a couple of cans, one box of tea, a small container of coffee, and two sets of silverware. I took only one. That was enough. It would last me a few days at the very least. There was some emergency money stashed in the kitchen drawers—it wasn't much, but it was enough. Enough to pay for a ferry, for example, or an ostritchhorse and wagon. It would run out fast, but it was something. Coupled with what I had carried with me in my wallet, it would hold up for a while, until the city had died down enough that I could come back and try to salvage my bank account.

 

Everything now jammed into the travelling bag, I went to the door, paused one last time to look over the room.

 

My uniform, fifteen years of memories. The bed where I had held the love of my life. The kitchen where he had spilled coffee on himself, laughing, at half-past seven.

 

My throat was tight when I stepped out and closed the door behind me. They would probably find it in a few days or longer if nobody checked until the rent went unpaid. And that meant I had to be long gone.

 

The sun was sitting high in the sky, bright, and the city was silent. Walking down the streets, almost entirely devoid of life, one hand on the strap of the travelling bag and the other in my pocket, teeth grit against the steady, unstopping pressure and pain in my chest, I watched the clouds scud along the horizon of the bay. It was calm. Quiet.

 

It's ironic, isn't it, how beautiful the world can be on the same day it breaks your heart and soul.

 

I got out of the city limits at about sunset, and the yellow-orange painted everything in a diffusing glow. As much pain as I was in, I had a long night of walking ahead of me, and so I stopped, finding a smaller cove with a short beach, dropping to the ground, taking the weight off of my aching feet, pulling over the bag and digging out the knife I had brought and a can of beans, cracking it open the hard way, grimacing until I managed to break the top, starting to saw through the metal, wincing at the noise. But it worked, and soon enough, I had gotten the can far enough open to be able to spoon out the beans within. Pulling out the spoon and setting into it, not a nice meal but an edible one, I looked out at the half-set sun and saw something floating on the water.

 

There are those moments that make you, against all forethought or logic, do things. Like twenty-three years ago, when I had stopped with my last five yuan of what I thought was going to be my last paycheck ever and bought a kebab at a roadside stand, only to be standing in the exact position to break the fall of a small-town kid getting hit by a car. Or that had made us decide to go out to dinner late one night, only to find a family getting mugged just as we were leaving the restaurant.

 

Those are the moments where, regardless of whether or not you want to, you do something. I set down the beans, wedged them into the sand so that the can wouldn't fall over, and kicked off my shoes, tugged down my socks, rolling up the hems of my pants until they were tight around my thighs, and pushed myself to my feet, coughing into the cuff of one sleeve, approaching the edge of the water lapping at the shore. It was floating a good ten feet out, bobbing along on the current, currently stuck in one place. The sunlight glinted off of it a bit, although dully. It wasn't reflective, just white, and I winced as I stepped into the water—it was icy cold, something I had discovered when Avatar Korra had knocked me off the top of the Bending Arena and into it, but I waded a bit deeper, down to my ankles and then to my knees, just about to the edge of where my pants were before I reached it, letting go of one leg to slip just a bit into the water as I stretched out to grab what it was. I didn't right away, just backtracked far enough that my pants wouldn't get any wetter, back until the surf hit just at my ankles.

 

And then I looked at what I held in my hand and I almost threw it back in the surf.

 

The paint had never been sealed on, and it wasn't by any means a piece of pottery—no, the mask had just started out white, and here it was now, back as it started, sitting in the palm of my hand, the paint washed off by the surf, leaving only faint pinkish marks where the red lines and circle had once been, the rest off-white, pockmarked and scratched from years of being worn. It felt incredibly heavy in my hand.

 

"You gave it all away, didn't you," I whispered, as if the mask could give me answers that the man that wore it never did. When there was the sound of a motorboat running by I didn't even look up, just continued looking at the mask, its empty eyes staring back at me. 

 

I stepped out of the water, shook down my pants, and crammed it back into my bag. I didn't want to look at it. Maybe not ever again.

 

 

 

When I started off again, it was just starting to turn toward twilight. It was quiet, except for the lapping of waves on the shore, and the very hem of one leg of my pants was damp, smacking against my ankle. It took my mind off the pain in my chest and abdomen, the annoyance of having one damp pants leg and one damp sock, while the other was perfectly dry. The sun finally finished setting, leaving everything in that half-light, the last rays reflecting off the clouds, the horizon purple.

 

As terrible as the day had been, in so many ways, the further I walked the better it seemed to feel. Like I was leaving everything behind. Honestly, I wasn't even certain where I was going yet, just wandering. Just going until I stopped. Hazily at the back of my mind I thought about returning to the farmhouse that my family had lived in, about a two day journey from Republic City on foot, one on an ostrichhorse, but nothing solid yet.

 

I kept walking, and the twilight finally slid on into early darkness, the half-dim kind where everything is just blurred, fireflies lighting the path, the moon starting to rise. It was full tonight, and it reflected off the water, illuminating the waves.

 

My younger sister, when we were kids, always liked to give personality to the things around us. To the grass, and the animals, and the sun, and the moon. She had said that the moon was kind and benevolent, and wanted only the very best for all of us, and smiled on the people that walked the earth. I had always ignored her, but in that moment—that moment.

 

It was almost like the moon was _guiding_ me to see the debris, floating in the water. The wood spars, tossed against the rocky coast, the rudder floating by, the glove hanging half-off one of the larger pieces. 

 

An Equalist glove. One of the ones Hiroshi had designed. Stepping closer, approaching slowly with caution, I continued, following the trail of remains, to a half-bown-apart generator, the clone of mine—a backup.

 

I knew just before I took a step further that rounded a large outcrop of rock what I was going to see, but that didn't make it any better. They were laying there on the sand, together. I only knew it was Tarrlok by pure guessing—his body was half blown to hell, most of the hair gone, one entire arm and most of a leg missing, burned almost beyond recognition, long past saving.

 

And next to him, laying on his stomach for obvious reasons when I saw his back, was Amon. The entirety of both his uniform coat and the fire-retardant undershirt cloth that Hiroshi designed, what had probably saved his life, had been scorched away and replaced by burns that had blackened his skin, white bone peeking out in a few places and all over his arms **.** His legs were unharmed, but the back of his head was completely cauterised, oozing slightly, most of the hair gone except more towards the front, and slowly, he turned toward me, with a superhuman feat of effort.

 

It's an irony of life that his brother blowing up a boat gave him scars worse than he could have ever faked himself with makeup. It was probably a miracle he had kept both his eyes, with the rest of the damage that had been done.

 

But it didn't matter that his nose was gone, that the one ear I could see with the way his head was turned was practically melted off, half his lips burned, eyebrows vanished, teeth visible where his mouth was—none of that mattered. I would have known his eyes anywhere. Grey-blue, and like the eye of a storm. He coughed, a bit of seawater sliding out of his mouth, and tried to sit up, but none of his muscles would move. He just coughed again.

 

I don't know what it was that made me approach. At the moment, certainly not love. But I did approach, sliding down the rocky outcropping, pausing to step around Tarrlok's body, the other wood spars washed onto land, to kneel beside him, reaching out to touch his cheek. 

 

"Lieu?" He whispered. His voice was hoarse, shot, and he sounded as bad as he looked. And in that moment, damn me to hell, I had never loved him more, never been happier to see him. I couldn't stand the sight of him, I felt sick with how he had lied but—I loved him. Completely. Irrefutably. And I had, for half my life. "Why?"

 

"Because you aren't dead yet," I replied, putting my bag down next to him, digging until I came up with the first aid kit, which had enough bandages I could cover the worst of his burns. "And on my watch, you aren't going to be."

 

His eyes just closed, in exhaustion, or relief, or acceptance. But he was still breathing. So, it was a start.


	2. Chapter One (And A Half)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s a lot to a relationship. There’s a give and a take, a pull and a push. And sometimes, just when you think you’ve lost it all, a little bit can go a long way.
> 
> The Lieutenant finds Amon half-dead after Tarrlok explodes their boat, and nurses him back to health. They’re a long way from what they were, but that doesn’t really matter, because they’ve started to become something else. Something better.
> 
> It’s a hard road, and they’ve got a long way to walk—but wherever they go, they’re going together.

There is something about falling in love, they say, that makes a man crazy. I believe it. I have seen it, in my father's eyes, in love with his own image and his own revenge and his own creations and not his wife. In the eyes of those who would worship my image. And in the eyes of the one person who never worshipped anything, just loved me unconditionally, because someone had to. And in the end, I broke him. Because something in me lost its way, too. And you can't love without loss.

 

Once, Hiroshi Sato asked me about love. It was the tenth anniversary of his wife's death—he was avoiding his daughter because she preferred to be alone, because he preferred to work until he forgot what her voice sounded like—and he had called me up to the house to show me the finalised prototype of the shock glove.

 

Having given the go-ahead for the production of the first hundred, I watched as he leaned against the table in his workshop, running fingers through his hair, staring down at the photograph on his desk while I glanced through some blueprints.

 

 _Amon,_ he said, voice loud in the quiet, and looked towards me. _Have you ever been in love?_

 

I paused, my hand hovering, fingers curled around the edge of one blueprint in particular, sketches of my Lieutenant wielding his kali sticks, the original designs of the generator. What was I supposed to say to that? We kept our personal lives separate, but I knew Hiroshi. He knew me. We worked hand in hand.

 

 _Yes,_ I finally answered, letting go of the blueprints, folding my hands behind my back. _Just once._

 

 _Only once?_ He looked at me a bit surprised. I raised an eyebrow, although he couldn't see it.

 

 _Is that so odd?_ Hiroshi paused, and then shrugged a moment later.

 

 _Teenage love,_ he said quietly. _What was she like?_ He had told me about his wife before, the year prior. He had just avoided everybody else, come to the office in the headquarters, and shared a drink with Lieu, and told us about her. Her name had been Taara. They had been very in love. 

 

 _She—_ No. It felt wrong to say that. I leaned against the table with the blueprints. Lieu was anything but feminine. _He's intelligent. Straightforward. Honest. Forthright. Loyal. Brave. Anything I could ever ask for._

 

Hiroshi looked at me for a long time as I finally unfolded my arms and folded them again, hands pressed together, over my thighs.

 

 _It's the Lieutenant, isn't it._ It wasn't even a question.

 

He couldn't see it, but I was smiling.

 

—— Chapter One : ——

_O villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain!_

_My tables—meet it is I set it down_

_That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain—_

_[ Hamlet, Act I, Scene v ]_

 

If there was ever one thing that I did not mean to do, it was to break the heart of the one man who truly loved me. I meant for lots of other things to happen—to lure the Avatar, to break her spirit, to steal her bending. I meant for my brother to be out of the equation, so that he couldn't get himself hurt. But it was never in the plan to hurt him. I never wanted to see Lieu look at me, after twenty-three years, like everything he had gone through with me didn't matter anymore. I had seen him many things in the years between us—euphoric, livid, anxious, defeated, broken. But never once had he turned that look on me—the look of heartbroken sorrow that I knew meant absolute disgust with me. With everything I was.

 

He had never questioned me, and I had been grateful. All our years together he had taken my past as business long-since-done. Even when I had been eighteen and awoke in the night screaming, calling my mother's name until my throat was hoarse, he hadn't questioned it. He had just held me, rocked me back and forth, whispered soothing words. And in return, I had never questioned why he looked on history with such a questioning eye, or why he hated the things he did. We were new people from day one, a Satomobile and a kebab stand.

 

I had never wanted to make him stop loving me. Selfish, yes, sickening, yes. But I could not imagine my life without him, without his voice and his smile, the light in his eyes that spoke volumes of his affection for me. Without someone to call my name in the night and hold me while I fell asleep. And in pursuit of that, I had lied. Repeatedly. And he had trusted me to be his brother in arms and his partner in life and battle all injustices we shared hatred for—and I had betrayed that trust.

 

Rather spectacularly, actually.

 

He had never lied to me, either. When I had asked him, once, what it was that made him hate Benders so much, he had told me. Not a lot, not the details, but he had told me enough to understand and to see and to feel closer to him. And I had never returned that trust, and he had never asked, and when I heard his footsteps behind me, the half-swing of the door, I wanted to scream.

 

There is no valour in winning when that win is only going to make you lose more in the long run. There is nothing to brag about when you have traded the one thing you ever truly cared for for…a battle, one meaningless, pointless, stupid victory. One we didn't even _need._ Lieu had given me everything of him. His heart, soul, body, mind. His smiles, his frowns, his ups, his downs. And in return, I had given him…nothing. Nothing but empty promises, and an organisation, a revolution, built on false pretences. _My_ false pretences.

 

And, Spirits bless him, Lieu had never minded. He had never complained when I would spend days locked away in my office, fervently working myself ill on some plan or another (except to, when I was calm enough, shove me out of the room and force me to sleep), and had never minded that he was the one that found ways around our schedule to continue to be two men in love and not two men working, or that I would forget all about him in the heat of some moment, my mind lost elsewhere, that I wouldn't share his bed at night to instead throw all my energy into something else. He had never been indignant, or angry. He had just held us together the same way he held something newly-built—carefully, gently, in the palms of his hands.

 

His footsteps stopped. Dead, in their tracks. I could feel him standing there too, his heart racing, his blood pounding—either in preparation for an attack or in fear or anguish or something—

 

_Amon!_

 

I almost jumped out of my skin. I had never been happier to have two people completely distracted than the Avatar and her (sidekick?) boyfriend were at the moment—because they probably would have seen it.

 

I could count the number of times he had said my name like that on one hand without lifting all my fingers. And each and every time had ended in a row so blisteringly angry that at the end of it we hadn't been able to look each other in the eye for days. Somehow, I doubted we would ever look each other in the eyes again.

 

_You traitor._

 

I was a traitor. And I deserved whatever he did or said in that moment—I knew he would never attack me. He had told me, promised me, late in the dark one night after one of our own, one of our oldest, had betrayed us, broken my leg, and tried to kill Lieu. He had held me that night, promised with whispered words into the skin of my collarbone that he would never betray me. Never leave me, or attack me. And I believed him.

 

But we all do stupid things when we aren't thinking clearly, and at that moment, neither of us were. We had both gotten almost no sleep the night before. The past two weeks had been busy. And the past two years. I felt tired to the bone and my head was spinning with fear and terror at what I had done— _already_ done, what I had left to do. And nobody thinks clearly when they're like that. It's all desperation and anxiety and anything and everything that you think of first.

 

_I dedicated my life to you!_

 

Footsteps ran toward me, I heard the shift of his weapons and I did the first thing I thought of—I turned and raised my hand against the only person that had ever loved me. He stopped dead in his tracks, thrown back, held in the air and I could taste bile in the back of my throat and terror in my blood.

 

There were tears leaking down his cheeks. I just held him there, desperately trying not to tighten my fist, fingers shaking. What was I supposed to do now—now that I had thrown everything away.

 

_You served me well, Lieutenant._

 

The words burned my tongue, and before I could look at him anymore, before I could break down, scream apologies, before he could say my name again, I tossed him to the side, shaking, heart pounding, turned around. Continued. I couldn't say his name, not now, not after I had betrayed him, I couldn't leave him waiting for me and wanting me. I couldn't destroy what life he had left without me by giving him away.

 

When I ended up thrown against the wall, ducking behind one upraised hand to shield myself from the fire, beams falling over, crashing against my shoulders and arm, I waited for the footsteps of the Avatar's firebender to vanish out the door before I threw myself free, stumbling to my feet and glancing over at Lieu.

 

He was laying under the beams where I had thrown him, staring at me with anguish in his pale, pale blue eyes. They reminded me of the moon. He looked at me like I was the greatest and most terrible thing in the world, broken beyond repair.

 

 _I'm sorry,_ I whispered, and I knew even before I went out to face the rest of my destiny, that would never be enough.

 

 

 

And so we come to this. Me, thrown out the glass—I'm not _like_ Lieu, I can't take fifty hits, stand back up with broken ribs, dust myself off, and keep fighting—and the mask gone flying away, hitting the water hard enough to wind me, knock my eyes closed.

 

For a moment I wondered what it would be like to just sink down and stay down there. To just drown. But then the oxygen in my lungs started running out and I _couldn't_ die, not like this, with so much left unfinished, and it was instinct that made me pull the water, dragging myself upward and outward, balanced on a pillar, looking toward the girl and her boy-toy standing there in the broken window, staring at me. At all the people below, watching me. 

 

I had been the solution. And now I was nothing.

 

 

 

It was almost amazing, how easily the Waterbending came back to me. I hadn't used it actively in years, except sometimes to pull the tide in against our window, the even spray of foam lulling me to sleep, and to take the Bending of others away. But the moment I started using it again it was like I had never stopped, shooting myself along under the waves until I was halfway across the bay, eyes wide, watching the edge of Air Temple island loom under the waves, getting closer and closer, my oxygen running out, until I threw myself out of the water, slamming hard onto the craggy rocks that were the base of the island, clawing forward until I was propped on a flat stone and coughing what little water there was in my lungs up until my chest hurt.

 

And then I just laid there. Everything hurt. My chest and back ached from hitting the water. My eyebrows were partially singed off and all my muscles twitched from being electrocuted. My coat was singed and waterlogged, and most of all—my heart burned.

 

Lieu had looked at me like I was someone he had never seen before. In some ways, I was. Noatak. Nobody had called me that in decades until the Avatar had shouted it at me—Tarrlok had told her, that much was obvious. I should have kept him somewhere she wouldn't have checked. _You should have killed him,_ some small part of me said, but I ignored it. We were the same, in so many ways. We shared the same crimes, the same heritage.

 

I could not kill the one relative I had left. I just…couldn't.

 

At the moment, I wanted nothing more than to lay there forever. Everything hurt, and most of all my heart, and it felt like a fitting place. Let them find me here. I wouldn't fight back. They could just take me, I wouldn't care. Not anymore. Losing the revolution was one thing. Losing the respect and followers was one thing. 

 

Losing Lieu was another entirely.

 

I wondered what he was doing now. Probably dragging himself out of the Arena. He would get out of there, I knew. I hadn't killed him. (Oh, how I hoped). He would get out of the city as fast as he could. Run, run away. And I _wanted_ him to. He didn't need to be persecuted for this. I did. Groaning, lifting one hand to drop it on my chest, feeling my own heartbeat rushing to pump adrenaline-fast blood through my system, I wondered what would happen.

 

If I just stopped it. But I didn't. I could hear Lieu's voice, repeating. _You traitor._ I could imagine his face, twisted, staring at me, if he found out I had killed myself. _Running away._

 

I groaned and sat up, rolled over, and sat there, kneeling on the stone, until I could drag myself upright, stumbling to my feet, regaining my balance and looking up at the island. I couldn't climb the rocks, I was too tired, and I dragged my hands forward and upward, a spout of water catching me, carrying me upward to land on the solid ground above, dragging one leg under me and hauling myself to my feet, and started walking. The temple loomed high above me, and I reached the steps.

 

There were still dents in the steps and the murals, clawed into the stone, from when we had taken the island. Every movement made my body ache, but I continued climbing until the soreness wore off and it was just an ache in my muscles. I wasn't badly injured, just a bit achey. A bit singed. It was only my heart that was broken, and it made the rest of me hurt in equal measure too.

 

I reached the courtyard in front of the tower and stared up, my hands hanging heavy at my sides. Turning, I looked back toward Republic City—the Bending Arena, the remains of the boats recently destroyed. It was all quiet. Not for long, most likely. Things would start moving soon.

 

I turned back and continued climbing to the air temple, pushed the door open, and started up the ladders and stairs to the top floor, the attic, where my brother was waiting. Every step felt heavy, like I was pulling myself away from what I wanted most—which was to go find Lieu. To try to explain, or at least right everything. I couldn't, though. And as I dragged myself up the last ladder, turning to see him in the cell, I felt a punch to my gut.

 

Tarrlok was right. We had tried so hard, and we had failed and fell so far. We were exactly what our father made us to be, and nothing more. We were his creations. We had carried out his will, destroyed and won his city each in our own way. Oh, how I hoped the old bastard was rolling in his grave in pleasure.

 

The attic floor creaked beneath my feet as I unlocked the door to Tarrlok's cell. _Please. You're all I have left in the world._ And oh, it wasn't a lie. Not at all. I'd had Lieu before. But I had screwed that relationship beyond all hope of rebuilding. And now here I was, running away again. Just in a different way. I didn't want them to bring me before the city, the deposed tyrant.

 

The mob would tear me apart before justice ever got to. And they would do it so much more completely. I would have no hope of recovering. There would be no justice. I would die beneath their scraping nails and their hatred, burned out. I had lied to them, and this had always been a risk. But now, facing it head-on, I knew that if I stayed, I really would be killed.

 

So instead I took Tarrlok's hand, and together we climbed down in silence to the back of the island where a boat waited.

 

It had been meant to be our last-option getaway boat, for Lieu and I. It had several gloves, Hiroshi's design (what had happened at the airfield, there was another question, since only the Avatar and associate had been at the Arena—where was the rest of her team—where was Hiroshi) and an extra generator tossed against the back of one chair.

 

I looked away from Tarrlok when I helped him get in, so he wouldn't see my eyes. I could feel my throat tight, my eyes burning. Lieu had built his own generators. I could imagine his hands wrapped around the kali sticks.

 

And then I got in the boat and pulled the keys from my pocket, flipping through them to get to the one for the boat, turning it and starting the engine. I could feel Tarrlok sitting behind me, leaning easily against the back seat, and it was quiet between us. There was so much to say, and yet so little. We had gone our own separate ways twenty-six years ago, and now we were trying to start over. I had taken his Bending.

 

Speeding away from the island, turning the boat to make a loop around it and then speeding the boat out of the bay, I arced us by the Pro-Bending Arena, guiding the boat along the edge of the coast and then further out to not throw up waves in the surf, staring straight ahead at the slowly setting sun.

 

It had taken me significantly longer to get up to the attic than I had thought—I must have laid on that rock for some time. It hadn't felt like it, but the sun was going down and it had been just before noon that everything that happened with the Avatar had taken place. 

 

When you get lost in your thoughts, it's hard to get out of them.

 

The silence started to stretch thin between us, and finally I started, _The two of us, together again._ It had been so long. _There's nothing we can't do._

 

_Yes, Noatak._

 

It didn't feel right to be called Noatak. I had left him behind and dead in the North Pole years before. I didn't want to think back to that. To what it was like to be trapped so tightly in the knot of hatred that was my Father's love, to try to protect my brother and fail, the way my mother was so proud of the food we brought home from the hunt, commending my skills—and not knowing that I had dragged those animals close by their blood, seen the terror in their eyes as I raised my knife.

 

I had picked Amon. And Amon I had been. And Amon I would have stayed if Noatak hadn't been tugged back to me from where I had left him, crying in a blizzard until his tears froze to his face, caught his eyelashes together, and he crawled free to live differently.

 

 _Noatak._ It sounded so foreign on my tongue, a long-lost language that I had forcibly cut out of me. _I had almost forgotten the sound_ (and taste, and movement, and feel) _of my own name._ My given name. The name that my father and mother had picked. Inside, I felt like Amon. And that was the name Lieu had called when he was inside me. Not Noatak.

 

_It will be just like the good old days._

 

I felt him move. I couldn't see, but I knew. Reaching out to the shelf full of gloves. Pulling one closer, sliding it onto his hand. I felt him twist open the fuel cap, and I held tight to the wheel, watched straight ahead, felt the tears in my eyes. I had failed everything, and everyone. I had lost the one person I loved. And now I wasn't going to stop him.

 

I closed my eyes as Tarrlok turned on the glove.

 

The explosion was so loud that it deafened me for a moment, but that was lessened next to the searing, burning pain as I was thrown, reacting automatically, throwing up a wall of water one-handed, flying to hit the water, hard, and wood spars smacked into me as well. The salt in the water burned me, eating at the injuries. It _hurt._ All of me hurt, a different pain from everything else.

 

I realised after a moment that the noise I was half-hearing wasn't my ears unstopping after the explosion—it was me. Screaming. I was still screaming. Treading water, trying to turn my face to get the salt out of my wounds—but I _couldn't,_ my entire face was on fire and I couldn't feel my back, my right arm and leg useless, I scrambled for the first thing I felt, a spar of wood, clinging tight, the fingers of my left hand curled hard enough into it that my nails ached, and opened my eyes.

 

Everything was on fire. There was wood everywhere and I couldn't swim, and a good fifteen feet in front of me was Tarrlok, broken like a ragdoll, sprawled on top of what had been the backseat of the boat moments before. Kicking one-legged and swimming closer, I hesitated and then dragged my right arm up, my entire body in searing pain, and wrapped my fingers around his shoulder, turned him over.

 

His right arm was gone. So was half his leg. His face was entirely burned off, his chest charred, his skin smoking. It smelled disgustingly like cooked meat—well, I supposed, both of us did. Moving to clench my left hand around the remains of his tattered shirt, I gave up on treading water.

 

Everything hurt. The surf lapped us to the side, the setting sun cast stark light on everything, throwing dark shadows, and the water stretched on so far in either direction. But the shore was behind me, to the left of the boat, and it was with exhaustion in every bone of my body and burning pain that I summoned just enough water, a physical effort, and _pushed._ It threw me, and Tarrlok with me, a good distance. And again. And again. And again.

 

Again and again until there was the shore, looming, and my body was stopping working. The water was cold—the water, that I had felt safe with for so long, now that the sun was dipping below the horizon, was getting cold. It seeped into me and the constant pain of the salt digging into my burns had dulled to a permanent ache just between my shoulderblades, and I wanted to stop.

 

Stop and lay still until I died, until nothing hurt anymore and I never had to move again.

 

One last push brought us to the beach and my muscles gave out at last, dropping Tarrlok to the side, his body rolling away from me and I fell onto the sand on my back.

 

It hurt so much I screamed. This time, my ears were open enough to hear it echoing back to me from the rocky shore, and I shook, turning, catching myself on my left hand, sobbing in pain, and fell down onto my face.

 

That hurt less. Marginally. Because at least most of my chest wasn't burning. Aching, my entire body in excruciating pain, I breathed against the sand, felt its grains in the back of my throat, and looked to Tarrlok. My eyes wouldn't stay open.

 

"I'm sorry," I whispered. I hardly recognised the voice as mine.

 

 

 

When I came to, it was to footsteps, crunching nearby. It was cold, and everything was pain, everything. Breathing was pain. Blinking was pain. My whole body hurt, and the briefest brush of the breeze was enough to send sharp jabs of agony into the ache that was all of me. I coughed—while I had been unconscious the tide had started to come in—and water slid out of my mouth. It burned the back of my throat, and it tasted like ash. I ached. Staring at the rocks on my side, wondering when the burns or the chill or the exhaustion would kill me, I shifted.

 

I had never known it could hurt so much to move my head. Because it did. _Spirits_ it did. I could feel my bones grating together, my muscles screaming, and I managed to turn over, to look at who was standing there.

 

Lieu looked down at me. It was fitting, really. I was so cold, so tired, but there was still a surge of warmth inside me—just looking at him. And he watched me back with critical eyes, pale as the edges of the horizon, and then he stepped down a moment later, onto the beach, the sand crunching beneath his feet. He stepped over the body of my brother and came closer, knelt beside me, his expression closed off.

 

His fingers against my cheek hurt on the raw remains of what had once been my skin. But they were gentle. Taking a deep breath, trying to remember how to articulate my mouth, realising for the first time as I tried to move my lips that there were small parts of them missing. "Lieu?" My voice didn't sound any better, but at least I could still talk. He just kept looking at me with his cool, clear eyes, studying me. Taking stock of what the hell I looked like at the moment, probably. Deciding if he was going to leave me here.

 

I wouldn't have blamed him if he had.

 

But he didn't get up and leave a moment later, like I thought he would, and, pausing, wetting the inside of my lips, I whispered, "Why?"

 

"Because you aren't dead yet," he finally replied, setting down his bag, digging into it, and I recognised the first-aid kit that he pulled free. He owed me nothing. I had broken his heart, his faith, his trust. And still he was coming back to take care of me, and I didn't deserve any of his love. "And on my watch, you aren't going to be."

 

For a moment longer I stared at him, but then I was too tired to keep my eyes open any longer and I sighed and closed them, leaning back into the sand. I was too tired. In too much pain. And now, even though he shouldn't have cared for me in the least, here he was.

 

And I was safe.


	3. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s a lot to a relationship. There’s a give and a take, a pull and a push. And sometimes, just when you think you’ve lost it all, a little bit can go a long way.
> 
> The Lieutenant finds Amon half-dead after Tarrlok explodes their boat, and nurses him back to health. They’re a long way from what they were, but that doesn’t really matter, because they’ve started to become something else. Something better.
> 
> It’s a hard road, and they’ve got a long way to walk—but wherever they go, they’re going together.

_Ow,_ I grunted, grimacing as Amon finished helping me out of my uniform and guided me to sit on the bed, pulling close a bowl of water and setting it in his lap, coaxing my sprained ankle up to rest on his thigh next to it, while I pressed one hand to my chest, breathing shallowly.

 

 _You're lucky it isn't any worse,_ he replied, looking up at me, mask still on, grey eyes unreadable. The light on the bedside table was on to illuminate while he worked, carefully tugging off my boot and then my sock, dropping them both to the floor, picking up one of the cloths from the bowl, setting it onto my ankle to help the swelling go down. _You didn't break any other bones._

 

 _My entire body is one huge bruise._ I rubbed at my eyes with my free hand and Amon sighed, shaking his head, shifting off the chair to leave my foot balanced there and moving to sit next to me on the bed, carefully unlacing his bracers and setting them on the mattress, rolling up his sleeves.

 

 _And a cut,_ he sounded amused. _You've got plenty of those too._ They were mostly the little stinging kind—caused by falling into a bunch of trees and by the Avatar's dog's claws. The claw scratches were significantly larger and deeper. Wetting the other cloth, Amon started sponging them down, gently wiping away the dried blood, uncaking the scabs. _How did it happen?_

 

 _After Tenzin's kid knocked me over the roof it took me a while to get back up—_ I had landed on my tailbone, hard, it was probably a miracle that wasn't broken either, _I made it just in time to jump at the four of them on the dog. And you really can't do much against a polarbear dog._

 

 _I learned that lesson a lot younger than you did, clearly._ Amon chuckled and finished with the larger cuts and made quick work of the smaller ones—it stung, but hurt a lot less than the broken ribs did. _When I was twelve a polarbear dog tore down half our family tent and ate our entire winter's store worth of seal jerky._

 

 _What happened?_ He nudged me to lift one arm, and cleaned up the scrape along the edge of my shoulderblade from the roof that I had hit, and then set the cloth down in the water, diluting it red, and picked up the roll of bandages and a few solid pieces of splint. He ran a few layers of bandage around my chest and then paused. 

 

 _Put those on,_ he said, handing them to me, and I pressed one to the front side of my broken ribs, and one to the back, and then he continued to bandage me up. _My mother was devastated—a lot of our income at the time came from what we caught, and my mother was the best in the village at making the spices to dry them with. Arm down,_ and I did that, and Amon switched to wrapping the bandages over my shoulder and upper arm, over the scrapes there, until he could switch back to going around my chest. _So my father and my brother and I formulated a plan._

 

He had never mentioned a brother before, but I had only ever mentioned my siblings when they had died. So I didn't pry at the time—I was just happy enough to hear stories of his childhood.

 

_My brother went out to get more seals—it was early enough in the winter that we could get a few more and manage to restock, but not sell anything. My father and I went hunting for the polarbear dog that had done it. We found it four miles from the town. We didn't fight it, but we stole back what it had taken—they tend to bury their food in the snow for later. We got back about a third of our foodstores and my mother's favourite dress mostly unharmed._

 

Amon tied off the bandages then and turned to sit next to me, our thighs pressing against each other, and he brushed back his hood, pulled off his mask, and lowered it to hold it in his hands. I looped one arm around his shoulders, pulled him close, and he leaned against my arm.

 

 _That was the last time I think I ever enjoyed spending time with my father._ His voice was very quiet, and I turned to press a kiss to the top of his head, brushing back his thick, dark hair, pressing my nose into the top of his bangs, still tugged back but looser now, at the end of the day.

 

I didn't say anything, because there wasn't anything to say. I just held him, and let him cry quietly, because twenty years before Amon had done the same for me. He had made me whole again. I would wait for the chance to do the same for him.

 

—— Chapter Two: ——

_fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject_

_to the same diseases, healed by the same means,_

_warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer_

_[ The Merchant of Venice, Act III, Scene i ]_

 

Pausing before I unwound the bandages from the kit, I looked over at Amon, laying there, the stillest I had ever seen him. "Can you heal?" I asked, and for a moment he remained motionless and then there was the slightest shake of his head—no. Not that healing probably would have been able to do much—in his state, the most it would probably do was accelerate his own healing process. Light burns were one thing, but this was bad enough that I could see blackened areas. His bones, in some places.

 

I didn't even know if he would heal at all.

 

The moon was high and full, and I hesitated for a moment. If we stayed here, the tide would continue to come in—saltwater in burns didn't seem like a good combination. I needed to get him somewhere that I could actually treat his wounds. Light a fire, boil water, and clean the burns before I bandaged them.

 

Tarrlok's body was also here. And I didn't want to sit next to it forever—I hadn't liked him in life and it was even more chilling in death. "Come on," I said at last, and bent over, hesitating for a moment before I slid one arm under his waist, dragging Amon upright carefully, avoiding touching his burns as much as possible. He was dead weight, completely unable to move his own muscles. And unfortunately, I wasn't in much better shape. The pressure in my chest was hellishly painful.

 

Amon could fix it. _Thus the saving him,_ I told myself, but it wasn't true. I wasn't saving him so he could save me. I was saving him because I loved him.

 

Groaning, shifting to throw his left arm, mostly uninjured, over my shoulder, I grit my teeth to stay crouched, hooking one hand under his left thigh and shifting him up my back. This sort of thing had been hard enough to do when he had passed out working at his desk, but then I hadn't been dealing with picking him up around half a body worth of burns. Turning to get his right side, as badly burned as it was, I hooked one hand under his other leg.

 

He hissed into my ear in quiet pain as my wrist wrapped around some burns on his thigh. "Can you handle it?" Head turned slightly, I looked at the remains of what had once been his face. One half-cracked eye looked back at me. Amon nodded, and I shrugged under his right arm over my opposite shoulder, and, balancing him like that, scrambled to get the first-aid kit back into the bag and grabbed it, pausing for a moment before I leaned down, ducked my head under the strap, and let it hang from my neck.

 

It was heavy and I was going to have muscle aches there on top of everything _else_ later, but we weren't going to survive without the limited supplies. And once again, I was giving my everything for him. Grunting, struggling, I managed to get to my feet with Amon leaning boneless on my back, motionless, and I pulled him higher.

 

The path was a good four steps up the rocky sides of the beach, but I paused before I started climbing it and looked down at Tarrlok. The head on my shoulder shifted slightly—these clothes were going to be ruined when we were done here—and Amon stared as well.

 

"He would want the water," Amon finally said, barely able to whisper it. I wondered for a moment if he was saying that because it was true, of if it was because he wanted to make it easier for me. Turning to look out over the water, at the debris still floating in, I glanced toward the moon, sitting low on the horizon, huge and full. I could see all the patterns on its surface, the white light it cast reflecting back off the water, and I felt suddenly warm.

 

Almost like I could hear a young woman laughing. Like my sister. It felt like a punch to my stomach and I looked away, back to the rocky wall of the beach, took a deep breath, and started to climb.

 

It was amazing how long four steps upward took me. The first time I tried I almost immediately overbalanced and it was only my reflexes that stopped both of us from toppling over—and if I had landed on top of Amon at that moment, he probably would have passed out, or I would have done something even worse to his already-terrible burns. And the pain in my chest probably would have knocked me out. It was bad enough now that I had all of Amon's weight leaning onto me. But, I righted myself, grit my teeth, and was more careful the second time, leaning to counterbalance the extra weight as I took the first few steps up, dragging myself onto the path, half-dropping to one knee and grunting at the sharp stab of pain up my leg before I stumbled to my feet.

 

Amon was heavy. Due no doubt in part to his waterlogged clothes, but still. The road stretched on ahead of us, no longer paved except with gravel and the lines of cart-tracks (you hardly ever saw Satomobiles outside of the Republic City limits) and it turned around the edge of the ocean, leading off into the distance.

 

And so we started walking. _I_ started walking, step by painful step, staring down at the ground, half-illuminated in the light of the moon, while Amon breathed shallowly next to my ear, grunting in pain every few steps.

 

How many times had we been in this position, one way or another? We met because he got himself hurt, and plenty of times since then I had carried him home and patched him up—but that wasn't even the tip of the iceberg. Just recently he had been helping me stay standing—after the Avatar's dog broke my ribs Amon had been the one to come find me on the beach of the island, half-caught in the branches of a tree, in excruciating pain, and had carried me back to our tunnels to fix me. The night where the Avatar hit me with a wall of stone in Tarrlok's hideaway, and Amon had berated me, and then fixed my dislocated shoulder. And before that, the night of Hiroshi's outing as a supporter, when we had dragged ourselves back to the tunnels, and instead of exploding he had just patched up my burns.

 

That was what being lovers was about. You were always there for each other. Or so I had thought. And now here I was again—picking us up and putting the pieces back together. I had more to give than Amon did, but sometimes being the one that walked a mile while he never moved an inch got old.

 

Not that any of that mattered. I didn't even know if Amon would survive the night. And how long I would last, either, bleeding like I was.

 

Trudging down the path, my pants leg no longer wet, feet crunching in the gravel, the moon was beginning to arc up toward the top of the sky as the last edges of industry and the city petered off into the emptiness of the farmland that sprung up around Republic City, and the path split in two.

 

I came to a halt. It had been twenty years since I had walked this far out of the city without a map, and I paused, glancing between the two, unsure of which way to go. Amon was out cold on my shoulder, so there was no asking him, and I hesitated.

 

Right, along the edge of the ocean, left further inland, to where a copse of trees started to flourish, and eventually no doubt thickened into an actual forest. In the forest I would be able to find some wood to start a fire, and that could let me boil water to clean off Amon's injuries—since we were so near the ocean, there would probably be a stream if nothing else. So, left.

 

Turning and starting down that path, I kept walking until the woods were thick around us and the moon was straight overhead in the sky, almost like it was rising to follow us, staying close to light my way, and exhaustion started to get to me. We would need to stop soon—I still needed to bind Amon's wounds.

 

And then I saw it through the trees—a light, in the distance. It wasn't the moonlight reflecting off of something, either. It was yellow, peering through the trees.

 

I hurried my steps, not even thinking about what I would do when I found it. If it was a campfire, or a house, or a small town. If it was a farm or a car—I just kept walking until we rounded a curve in the trees and I could see it fully.

 

It was a small farmhouse surrounded by a few fields with recently-tilled soil. There were two ostritchhorses outside in a pen talking to each other and scraping the ground, and even though the moon was high in the sky, there were quiet voices coming from inside. I could feel Amon stirring slightly, and I hesitated—and then I walked along the path between the fields.

 

I could ask to sleep in their barn, maybe use their fire to boil some water to clean him up. Nothing more—not because I didn't want to take charity but because we were strangers. Because we were the two most wanted men in Republic City. If it wasn't for the pain in my chest that I had been steadfastly ignoring, the solid knot just behind my sternum, the slowly-growing ache in my abdomen, I wouldn't have walked up the path, dragged myself up the steps to the front door, shifted to hold Amon tighter by his uninjured thigh, and knocked on the door.

 

The whisper from inside cut off abruptly with my knock, and I stood there, listening to Amon breathe, trying to count each one. They were significantly shallower than they had been when I had picked him up from the beach—which had probably been several hours before at this point. He was cold. Getting colder.

 

There were footsteps approaching from the inside and the door swung open, letting the yellow light from inside out. There was a young woman standing there in the doorway—Earth Kingdom no doubt, with dark hair pulled up in a bun, calm, thoughtful brown eyes, and wearing a loose night shirt with loose silk pants underneath. She stared at us for a moment in surprise.

 

"I know it's late," I started. My voice sounded so much more exhausted than I felt. "But could I borrow your fi—"

 

"Nan!" the woman shouted, and I jumped, jerking my head back, smacking it hard into Amon's. He woke up with a groan, fingers of his uninjured hand curling into my shirt collar, and I juggled to keep him upright a moment later as he turned his head. "Nan, come quickly!"

 

The woman slammed the door in our faces.

 

"What?" Amon whispered, incoherently. I grimaced—not like I blamed the woman for running for her husband (most likely) since two strange men, one burned utterly beyond recognition, had just shown up on her front doorstep, and I turned to step down from the porch. I was in no shape to fight. Amon was half-dead. Better to leave before one of us got hurt more.

 

The door reopened and the light spilled back out. It was the same woman, but this time with an older woman next to her. "Come in," she gestured us in. "Please." I hesitated, and turned back.

 

The older woman sucked in a gasping breath. "Oh no," she said quietly. "Here. Come in, quickly. I'll see what I can do." And then I noticed the pendant hanging at her neck—pale blue stone, carved. 

 

She was Watertribe.

 

We had found a healer.

 

 

 

Half an hour later and Amon was laying on the bed in the older woman's room—her name was Nan, and she was the young woman's mother-in-law. She had come here with her son, Toloak, when he and Xian, the young woman, had gotten married. She was from the Northern Water Tribe, and had eyed us both carefully, before carefully undressing Amon from his uniform, making certain not to damage his burns anymore, and had taken inventory of them then. It had taken a while. His burns were even more extensive than I had thought at first glance.

 

"Here," Xian handed me a bowl of soup. "What happened?" Nan had a bowl of water and was pulling it onto her hands, starting with Amon's back—the works of the burns.

 

"I'm…not sure." Her husband stood in the doorway of the room, arms crossed. "I found him on the beach like that. His brother was with him." I didn't need to say any more. I had only brought one person with me. "I was going to boil some water and clean his wounds and bandage them but—"

 

"You're lucky you found us, even luckier that tonight is the full moon." Nan had a quiet, husky voice. She reminded me a bit of my mother in the calm, careful way that she worked, blue eyes unwavering. "He would not have survived more than a day. I can't stop the scarring, but I can stabilise him. Nothing but time will heal these wounds."

 

I felt my heart race suddenly, looked at Amon's face. Eyes closed, unmoving, his face turned toward me, I was glad he was unconscious again. All the burning, raging anger that I had felt earlier in the day was down to a simmer, bubbling deep inside of me. It was replaced with a sort of aching cold that filled my bones and sank at the pit of my stomach like a brick in the water.

 

I couldn't even begin to imagine life without him. Without his smile, the way our hands felt laced together, the way he felt in my arms. And he might have broken my heart, but I had loved him long enough and hard enough that there was a callous there, too solid to be pulled apart.

 

If I lost him, I would lose myself.

 

Lowering the spoon into the bowl of soup Xian had handed me, I rubbed at my chin and sighed. Nan was still running her hands over Amon's back, and I thought about what we had done to Benders—I had seen Amon take away this power from plenty of people. Healers, policemen, young and old. Some of our own members. And I had never thought about what it could be used for, what good.

 

If someone had told me a year before that I would ever be sitting next to  a Waterbender while she healed the love of my life, first I would have laughed and said that Amon would never have willingly let a Waterbender heal him, because the only person I could think of who hated Benders more than I did was him, and then I would have laughed with him over it. But now I couldn't imagine being anywhere else.

 

Watching silently as Nan moved her hands over Amon's back, done with the burns around his waist, the wounds no longer weeping, moving up to the charred and blackened parts of his upper back, the yellow of pus, the white of his bones, I set aside the soup. Eating while I watched his burns, as terrible as they were, probably wasn't the best of ideas. Even if broth was most likely all I would be able to handle eating for some time—who knew what Amon had done to my body.

 

Well, he did. But right now he was unconscious, and would probably stay that way for a while.

 

"How long do you think they'll take to heal?" I asked, my voice a bit strained—more from the pain in my chest than anything else, although now that the adrenaline had worn off from the events at the Arena, now that I was far enough out of the city nobody would find me first thing in the morning, I could feel exhaustion climbing slowly up my bones, seeping into my skin like the lassitude in your muscles while you were taking a bath. If I went to sleep, I probably wouldn't wake back up for days. And that would probably spell death for him—or for me.

 

"I don't know," the water followed her hands, and the skin started reforming over the areas where it had been worst burned, covering Amon's shoulderblades before she moved down his right arm. "It could be a month—it could be six. It will take a very long time to heal fully, and even then…" Nan looked over at me. "You know him?"

 

"Very well."

 

"His burns will stop weeping, they will close up, they will heal. His skin will not." Her eyes met mine.

 

They were blue like the depths of the ocean.

 

"He will most likely never be able to go out in bright sunlight again. Any injuries he takes will be devastating without his skin to protect him. Someone will have to put lotion on the scars to keep them from tightening, and when he gets older he will have issues with it—strains pulling on the burns, most physical work will tire him significantly, and he will probably have problems moving quickly or stretching, at least for some time after he heals."

 

So there it was. Even if I had been able to recover from my internal damage, Amon would most likely never be a chi blocker again. If he moved too quickly he could tear the burns while they healed—and the scars would tighten his skin all over.

 

"But he will live?"

 

"I still don't know." Nan shook her head and sat down on the edge of the bed, to get a better angle, her hands gliding down his arm. Xian, the young woman, paused, and then sat down in the other chair, while her husband came in to lean, one hand on the back of it. 

 

"Where do you come from?" Xian asked, reaching up to take her husband's hand. I noticed for the first time looking over her the slight bump of her stomach—she was pregnant. The guilt hit my shoulders like a wave. 

 

We shouldn't have come here. _I_ shouldn't have come here—this was all my decision, Amon was too out of it to have any input on my decisions, stupid or otherwise. Here was a happy family, a pregnant wife, a doting grandmother. And if we were followed, I could bring down the entire police force onto their heads. Angry former Equalists. Hell—the Avatar.

 

"From the city," I finally replied. "I—" What had I done? I had left because I wanted to save myself, to get away from his shadow. And I had ended up right back in it. Literally, since he was too weak to walk and I was carrying him. "I left to find him, he vanished yesterday." And then I paused—using just pronouns didn't seem right, and all three of them had already introduced themselves to me. "I'm Te," the second half of my first name, the half I never used, "And he's—" I almost said _Amo,_ since it was so close to the name I knew him by, the name I had used for years. But it was too close to Amon. If they were questioned, Amon would sound similar enough that they could be searched—arrested without warrant, dragged to jail without benefit of charge or trial. _"_ Noa." That was his real name. Noatak and Tarrlok. It fit the two of them—and as I looked back at him, unconscious, hardly looking anything like the man I had slept beside for twenty years, I could see why his mother had picked it. It fit his face—what had been his face. His smile. The way he chuckled.

 

Somehow I didn't see Yakone picking it. Somehow I couldn't reconcile _Yakone_ and _father_ at all.

 

"I'm glad you found him in time to save his life," Nan murmured it into the quiet of the room, and then she shook her head. "This might take most of the night. You should all get some rest." She had included me with Xian and Toloak.

 

"Goodnight, Nan." Xian stood and kissed her mother-in-law's cheek and left, holding her husband's hand, and the room was quiet. I watched her as she kept cleaning him up—her hands brushing healing water over Amon's face, lessening the severity of the burns, making them redder and rawer but _healthier._

 

 _"_ You too," she said at last, looking over at me. Amon was still unconscious, his breathing still shallow, but at least he seemed to be resting easier. She reached out her free hand and touched my shoulder and then paused, her eyes narrowing, fingers curling into my shirt. I could feel something—like she was inspecting me. And she watched me closely.

 

"I'll stick to the chair," it came out more as a growl than anything else and I glanced to the side to break our eye contact. Nan removed her hand from Amon's face, turned toward me, sloughed off the used water and brought up a new handful.

 

"You're in just as bad shape," she said quietly. "Open your shirt. How did you do this to yourself?"

 

"I—" I began, but she gave me a look and suddenly all I could think of was my mother— _Lieu, honestly, you are the only child who could break their leg in the hayloft, whatever are we going to do with you_ —and I unbuttoned it with shaking fingers, holding still  as the cloth parted, and then I started coughing into the back of my hand, doubling over even as her cool fingers pressed against my chest, tingling against my skin even through the layers of bandages, and I kept coughing until finally it subsided.

 

There was a lot more than flecks of blood on my sleeve now. There were entire stains. It was getting worse.

 

"Fell out of a car." I finally managed to get it out. It was a lie, but the truth was even worse— _yes, the man you're healing is in fact the most wanted man in Republic City and is a Bloodbender and he tried to kill me. And yet I'm saving his life anyway. And you're helping._

 

"I can fix your ribs and staunch the bleeding, but nothing more." She stepped closer, her hand brushing around my chest, and I let out a shaking breath and leaned into the wood of the chair, closed my eyes. It had been more than a decade since I had seen a healer, but you never really forgot what it felt like. I could feel my ribs knitting back together, closing up. And as her hand slid downward over my abdomen, I started coughing again—but she was carefully stopping the worst of the bleeding. I could _feel_ her doing it. "You're in even worse shape than he is," Nan's voice was quiet.

 

"I thought healing couldn't—" coughing into my hand again, I actually felt the blood in my throat. I could taste it. "Fix internal wounds."

 

"We've come up a bit in the world since the War," even with my eyes closed I could hear the smile in the woman's voice. "Master Katara developed a system to staunch internal bleeding, but it can only be used during the full moon. And it can't fix anything else."

 

"So what does that mean for me?" The coughing was subsiding a bit and I opened my eyes when she pulled her hand away. The bandages on my chest were damp, and I started undoing them—I didn't need to keep my ribs splinted anymore.

 

"You have a lot more than just internal bleeding," Nan looked me in the eyes. "Your entire body is jerked to the left. Many of your organs are displaced." There was this sort of cold fear starting to form at the back of my skull. "You will have to be very careful—any strain could make you start bleeding again. I can't fix what causes the problem, I can just stop it. You still have a good bit of blood in your system, it will work its way out on its own."

 

"Oh." I rubbed at my shoulder, the one that I had landed on when Amon had tossed me. There was a bruise there, but no point in fixing that. "But…"

 

"If you are very careful," her voice was quiet, and nan turned away, sliding the water off her hand, getting some more, stepping closer to Amon on the bed, reaching out for his head, still closing up the worst of the wounds. "If you are very careful and do not do anything strenuous, you might last two months. But even just walking or running, let alone carrying him…the overwork will destroy your body.

 

"You will probably have two weeks at most."

 

I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the back of the chair.

 

Maybe I did need to sleep for a while.

 

 

 

Years of light sleeping woke me up when the first birds started singing outside the cottage window—I had stayed in the chair until I had fallen asleep, and nobody had moved me. Sitting up, grunting, I rubbed at the crick in my back and my neck from the chair, and looked over at Amon.

 

Nan was nowhere to be seen (she had probably gone to sleep elsewhere) and had left him on the bed. Compared to last night he looked significantly better. She had been right—there was no healing them completely, they were too terrible. I couldn't see what Amon's burns looked like now, but he was carefully bandaged up, and he was breathing evenly, still unconscious.

 

So he was alive, at the very least. And looked like he would be alive longer than I probably would be, as long as his burns healed all right. He would be a mess of scars when the bandages did finally come off.

 

The door into the room creaked and Xian was standing there, looking surprised to see me awake.

 

"I was just coming to check on you," she said quietly. "Would you like some breakfast?"

 

"I—" a moment of hesitation. "Yes, thank you."

 

The young woman smiled and beckoned me to follow her. Pushing myself to my feet I left the little room and followed her back into the main portion of the house where Xian sat me down at a table and spooned up a bowl of warm oats for me to eat, drizzling the top with honey and setting a spoon into it before she handed it over and poured me a small cup of water.

 

The house was silent as she made her own bowl and sat down across from me, legs folded under her. "I am always up before dawn," Xian began after a few minutes of silence between us. "Toloak wakes up with the sun, but I like to be up first."

 

"You must not get much sleep," I said, raising my eyebrows—it had been late when they went to bed the night before, but she smiled.

 

"Normally we go to bed earlier, but last night was an exception. It was a family celebration." She looked out the window at the horizon. "Nan and Toloak are from the North Pole, and last night was the 70th Anniversary of the death of Yue."

 

I recognised that name distantly. Where had I heard that before.

 

"Was she…a relative?" I asked, raising one eyebrow and carefully avoiding getting my moustache into the porridge. Xian looked a bit surprised.

 

"No! She is the Moon Spirit." I almost choked, and then covered it with a half-cough, carefully flattening my face.

 

"What?"

 

"Seventy years ago, during the War, Yue, the Princess of the Northern Water Tribe, gave up her life to become the Moon Spirit."

 

"You're saying the Moon Spirit is a person."

 

"Was," Xian corrected kindly. "Nan says she looks out for lovers who have lost their way, guides them back to each other so that they can find happiness." I stared at Xian, even though it was impolite—suddenly last night made a very different amount of sense. The light guiding me to find the wreckage, to find this cottage. My sister had, apparently, been spot on all along. "Toloak and I met on the night of the full moon," Xian smiled, looking down into her bowl, a half-smile on her lips. "I've already decided that if the baby is a girl, I'm going to name her Yue."

 

I looked down at my bowl, now empty, and resisted the urge to close my eyes. I set it onto the table and pushed myself to my feet, grimacing at the pressure in my chest—I might not have been bleeding out anymore, but I had lost a good amount of blood and I was still pretty screwed up inside. "We should get going." It was starting to get light outside. "We've made enough use of your hospitality."

 

"Let me help you get ready," Xian smiled, and stood up as well. With the two of us it took significantly less time to get ready to go, and she even contributed some food to my travel bag, as well as old clothes for Amon to wear whenever he woke up—looser than the civilian clothes I had taken from the closet in our safehouse, more room for his burns to breathe. By the time that I was standing at their front door, Amon once again over my back, the sun had risen and Toloak was awake—Nan was still asleep, who knew how late she had stayed up healing.

 

"Best of luck in your travels," Xian smiled at me, and I held up one hand, keeping Amon on my back with the other, and reached into the bag around my neck to tug out my wallet, pulling out half of what was inside, passing it over to her.

 

"Thank you for everything. You saved both of our lives." There was fifty yuan there, and I pressed it into her palm. "Best of luck with your harvest this coming summer, and with your child." Xian held it and stared in surprise.

 

"We can't—"

 

"No, please. Do." I paused, and glanced out the window. "And if it wouldn't destroy your livelihood…how much would it be to buy one of your ostritchhorses?"

 

Xian and Toloak looked to each other.

 

"We got them for fifty yuan together," Toloak said quietly, and I reached in and tugged out the other fifty, the other half, and passed it to him. There was still the money from the safehouse—that could get us settled.

 

"You are wonderful people," I said, meaning every word of it. "May the Spirits watch over you." Toloak just kept staring at the money as Xian stepped forward, helped me open the door, and I walked out onto the porch, the sunlight hitting my face, and smiled. We had a horse, a day to my family farm, and enough money to get started. And I would probably live two weeks.

 

Well, you never knew. A lot could change in two weeks.


	4. Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s a lot to a relationship. There’s a give and a take, a pull and a push. And sometimes, just when you think you’ve lost it all, a little bit can go a long way.
> 
> The Lieutenant finds Amon half-dead after Tarrlok explodes their boat, and nurses him back to health. They’re a long way from what they were, but that doesn’t really matter, because they’ve started to become something else. Something better.
> 
> It’s a hard road, and they’ve got a long way to walk—but wherever they go, they’re going together.

The climb up the five flights of stairs to our apartment was hard on my knees and by the time I reached the top I had to rest for a few minutes, gasping for my breath back before I continued to our apartment, unlocking the door and pushing it open. _Lieu, I'm home!_ It was fairly quiet, and I stepped inside, closing the door behind me.

 

He was standing at the kitchen table, one hand clenched around a piece of paper, the other over his eyes, his shoulders shaking. I paused, startled, and set down the bag on the counter. _Lieu?_ He didn't turn immediately, but finally did as I approached.

 

He looked startlingly older than twenty-two. There were circles under his eyes, red with tears, and there was a haunted look to his expression, like he wasn't sure he was even there anymore. I hesitated and reached out, set my hand on his arm. _Are you all right? Did something happen?_

 

 _I—_ He choked and rubbed the back of one hand over his eyes, half-raised the crumpled paper and then lowered it again. He didn't seem able to think of the words he was looking for. I tugged Lieu closed and he turned and leaned against my shoulder—a bit awkwardly, considering our still pretty significant height difference (one of these days my growth spurt was going to hit)—and let out a shaking breath. _It's a letter from my brother. My sister is dead. He's leaving for Ba Sing Se._

 

It was silent between us for a long time. He had never mentioned anything about his family before, even though we had known one another for a year now. Then again, I had never mentioned my family either—mostly because my family was a whole hell of a mess that I didn't want to bring up with anybody. Ever.

 

But he had a brother and sister—and if they were still in touch, probably close. So his parents must be dead. Hesitating, I wrapped both my arms back around his chest, laced my fingers together over his back, leaned until our heads pressed together.

 

 _I'm sorry._ He shook in my arms, slowly turning to wrap his arms around my waist and sagged against me, crying. _I'm sorry._

 

—— Chapter Three : ——

_O Time, thou must untangle this, not I;_

_It is too hard a knot for me t' untie._

_[ Twelfth Night Act II, Scene ii ]_

 

I remember walking. The sound of Lieu's breath, loud in my ears, the distant crunch of gravel, the pulse of his heartbeat. I remember the almost siren-song of the water, trying to draw me back to it, until it fell off. The whisper of trees. Footsteps and voices and light, doors opening and closing. The soft landing of a mattress. The tingle, prickle of cool water over my body, and then strong hands and bandages. Exhaustive sleep.

 

I remember being carried. The rock of something with uneven steps, the heat of the sun bearing down on me. Breath on the side of my face. Quiet, simple words that spoke of love and trust and promises. Falling, for a moment, and then being caught. Once again, walking. A door opening, closing. The smell of dust and age and decay. Being set in a chair before the darkness took me again.

 

I remember water poured between my lips, a warm hand holding mine. The taste of something that hardly felt like food and the whisk of something being dragged across the floor. Nightmares and daydreams, circling around my head. My brother crying, my father shouting, my mother praying. Sunlight, talking, voices. Being carefully lifted, my body wrapped, and put back down. A bed, slightly lumpy. Breathing and pain, mine or someone else's.

 

And then darkness, cool, all encompassing, and deep. And in that darkness, a voice. Saying my name. Many voices saying my name. _Noatak,_ said one, my brother, desperate. _Noatak,_ said another, my father, angry and vindictive. _Noatak,_ said a third, my mother, crying out for me into the storm—Anana, forgotten by everybody but her two sons. _Amon,_ said one, the Avatar, in terror and hatred. _Amon,_ said another, shouted in unison by two thousand. _Amon,_ said one, I didn't recognise, old and ancient and yet so young, calling out to me from so far away.

 

 _Amon,_ said a final one. Deep. Safe. Grating slightly, low in the back of the throat. It tasted like love and electricity in my ears, like fingerprint touches and warm sheets, slow mornings in half-light and open-window breezes. It wrapped around me and cried of love and lust and loss and life, of strong hands and stronger will, of eyes like chips of ice, of hair like the darkness, of a smile like the sun. Of shared meals and twined fingers and secrets whispered in the dark. Of skin touching and shared showers and love. So much love. So much love I could feel it in the centre of my bones like a solid, living force.

 

 _Amon,_ said the final voice.

 

And I woke up.

 

 

 

I was in a bed, somewhere I didn't recognise. It was late, late at night—there was no sunlight through the windows I could see, and there was a half-burned-down candle on the table that I could see. Everything ached, but less than it had when I last woke up. It wasn't a burning, screaming pain. Now it was just a slow boil under my skin and behind my eyes and inside of me, a simmer of affliction that filled all of me.

 

And there he was, asleep in a chair, eyes closed, snoring very softly. His dark hair was scattered over his face, mussed, and there were circles under his eyes, his chin on his collarbone. Lieu. He looked much the same as he had when he had found me on the beach, if a little bit more uncomfortable—and not as thin. I lowered my eyebrows, stared at his figure—his stomach, his abdomen really, was larger. Not as large as Hiroshi's had been, but sticking out pretty obviously into the cloth of his white shirt.

 

I wasn't certain just why that was, but there was some cold part of the back of my mind that said it was bad news.

 

Cracking my lips—it _hurt_ —I coughed, the fingers of my left hand curling into the sheets, I coughed again. "Lieu," it hardly came out as a word, more like a broken noise. Coughing a third time, managing to clear my throat I tried again. _"Lieu,"_ I groaned.

 

It reminded me of when I had been a child, and gotten ill. I would lay very still in bed and call for my mother, slowly getting louder and louder until she appeared, tugging her hair back, wearing one of my father's loose shirts, exhaustion in her eyes, and she would ask me what I wanted, and then make me better.

 

"Lieu," I finally managed to get it above a whisper and he jolted awake, exhaustion in his eyes, and looked around before he figure out it was me speaking and looked down at me. There was something unreadable in his expression and he stood, carefully, walked over, sat down on the mattress next to me, and reached out to press his hand to my forehead—like he was checking for a fever.

 

"Hey." He sounded exhausted, but he was still there. He hadn't left me to die. He had taken me somewhere. He was waiting for me. "How are you feeling?"

 

"Like…hell," talking was excruciatingly hard. It didn't help that I had significantly less in the way of lips than I had had when I had last had an actual conversation with anybody. My mouth and throat were also both incredibly dry. "Water."

 

Lieu stood and walked over to the table, moving somewhat uncomfortably, and poured water into a small cup and turned around, coming back over with it, and he carefully helped me sit up, grabbing the back of my left shoulder and putting the cup to my lips. The water was blessedly cool, and tasted heavenly. To my own surprise I drank the whole cup, and then Lieu pulled it away, set it aside. I licked the inside of my lips and tried to take inventory of my body while he helped me back to lay on the pillow, turning me once more onto my left side so that I faced off the edge of the bed, into the room.

 

"The worst of the burns are all over your head and face and your back. For the most part your legs aren't burned, except around the right ankle and your right thigh, and your left arm is untouched except for your hand and wrist. Your right arm and shoulder are just as bad as your back and your face." I closed my eyes. It made sense—that had been where I felt the worst of the burns while in the water. And also the side of the boat that the gas tank had been on. I was probably lucky I hadn't lost any body parts. Burns could heal, I supposed.

 

Well, I had lied about them enough. The Spirits had probably decided that at this point I deserved it.

 

"How long—" I whispered, my voice still cracking a bit, and he cut me off to save me using my voice,

 

"Two days. Three if you count the first night, but we've been here for two."

 

"'Here?'" I glanced up at him and he looked away. The gulf between us was surprisingly large. Or really, not surprisingly. I had lied to him for twenty years. I had attacked him, possibly quite severely injured him, and then he had saved my life.

 

There was no amount of apologising that could fix this.

 

"We're at my family's farm. Two days from Republic City. This far out, nothing's started to get around, and we're in a rural enough area. We should be safe. At least for a while." I very slowly nodded, stared at my fingers, curled in the sheet. They were bandaged in white linen—I couldn't see any of my skin. I wasn't certain if I even _wanted_ to.

 

"Lieu," I whispered. "I'm sorry—"

 

"I don't—I don't want to hear it. Sorry isn't enough." He raised a hand, looked away. "Not now." Maybe not ever. "I don't know what the hell made me decide to drag you from that wreck and carry you, find someone to get you half-healed. What convinced me to bring you here, to keep you alive. I don't know, and I don't want to think about it."

 

"I never meant to hurt you," I whispered. I could see the muscles in his jaw clench. "I just didn't—" What had I not wanted to do. To hurt him. To get him dragged into the hell that was my family, my history, my father. The mess he had created. The very thing that in the end I had done ten times worse by not telling the truth at the start. "I just wanted to forget it ever—"

 

"Amon—Noatak, whatever!" He looked over at me, and there was such anguish in his eyes that I felt slapped. "Just—" Lieu seemed at a loss for words and he stood up hard enough the bed rattled against the wall, ran fingers through his hair, searching for words. "Twenty years," he looked back over at me, suddenly very quiet. "I loved you and shared your bed for twenty years. I would have gone through hell and back for you—I _did._ " His hands shook, clenched in fists at his sides. "Did it never occur to you that you could have told me you were the Avatar, that you had killed my sister, that you had done anything that you were _anyone_ and I would still have loved you?" He paused. I could see tears in his eyes. "I love you even now."

 

I wanted to cry. But I couldn't.

 

"I can't do this right now," Lieu whispered finally, his voice hoarse, and he pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes. "I just—can't. We don't lie to the ones that we love."

 

"I know," I whispered. Lieu shook his head.

 

"No. You don't." I tried to raise one hand, to reach for him, and he stormed toward the door.

 

"Lieu, I'm sorry, I love—"

 

"No!" It was loud enough that I jolted, startled, and he swung back around. Lieu's eyes were bloodshot, his teeth were grit. "Just _shut up_ , all right? You've killed me, Amon. Broke my heart and killed me." He lowered his hands, shaking. "I don't even want to _look_ at you." He grabbed the door handle and jerked it open—gave me a split-second view of the stars, of distant trees, stepped through, and slammed it hard enough that the window above the bed rattled.

 

I closed my eyes and let out a shaking breath. It was quiet for a long time before I heard the unmistakable sounds of someone sobbing and hoarse shouting even if I couldn't make out the words, and something hit the wall of the house hard and I pressed my eyes into the bed, and sobbed several times on my own, brokenly.

 

No tears came. The explosion had burned them all away.

 

 

 

The second time I woke up it was midday and sunny. The room was painted in golden light and it was very quiet. There was a bird singing just outside my window—it was still too early in the year for cicadas. Distantly, I heard the passing sound of a Satomobile, and then the slow creak of a water pump coming to life and heavy, pained breathing, much closer. I was on my left side again, where the burns were not, and I let out a slow breath.

 

It was very quiet inside the house, and I was very alone. It was probably about ten minutes before I glanced up and saw the door open—it was more than a one room farm house, it had to be, but he had left me in the main room, probably for ease of care.

 

Lieu looked worse than when I had last seen him. His stomach was more distended, and there were dark circles under his eyes. He coughed every few steps and the tone of his skin was unhealthily yellow.

 

"Hi," I whispered. My voice cracked. He looked over to me—his eyes were bloodshot.

 

"Awake again, huh?" Walking further in, Lieu heaved a bucket of water up onto the table, dipped the same cup I had drunk from last time in, and brought it over to me. He walked uncomfortably. I glanced down at his body, but even though he half-grimaced at every step he didn't say anything.

 

So my help was not wanted, then. Even though the guilty voice at the back of my mind whispered, _you did this to him. This was you._ "How are you feeling?"

 

"Is—" he helped me sit up, surprisingly gently for the way our last conversation had ended, and helped me drink the water. It was cool and I felt it in the tips of my toes. "My mouth supposed to taste like sawdust?" Talking came significantly easier, too, even if I had to pause after speaking to take slow, deep breaths.

 

"You sound better, at least." Setting down the cup on the floor and helping me lay back down, he pulled over a chair and settled on it, leaning a bit forward—a momentary wince, a twitch of one eyelid, but it was gone seconds later as he folded his hands in his lap. "Noatak—"

 

"No." I shook my head very slightly. "Not…I'm not Noatak." I paused. "Well, I am. I was." Lieu watched me, waiting. For an explanation.

 

I had all but promised him one at the Arena, after all. And he deserved one, after twenty years and a broken heart. So, a deep breath, and I closed my eyes.

 

Where to start.

 

"After Avatar Aang took Yakone's bending, he was sent to jail. With the help of some associates he broke out. He underwent surgery to alter his face, and was healed to a new person. He returned to the North Pole.

 

"There he met my mother, Anana. They fell in love and were married. I was born, and three years later, Tarrlok was. When I was seven, and he four…we discovered we could Waterbend." I could still remember my parents' faces when we had shown them. My mother had beamed, her face glowing, and reached for my father's hand.

 

Yakone's expression had closed off, and it had never opened back up.

 

"When I was ten, Tarrlok seven, my father took us on what he called a hunting trip. He told us everything—his past, his real identity, how he lost his powers. He explained Bloodbending. And then…he started teaching us.

 

"From then on we were hardly his sons anymore. We were just tools. Instruments, for his long-overdue revenge. We were his creations and he would use us. However he wanted to. So…he did." My throat was dry, and I coughed.

 

Lieu stood, took the glass, refilled it, helped me drink, sat back down, and then I continued.

 

"Every full moon we went out training. I…was more of a natural than Tarrlok was. I didn't enjoy it, by any means, but it made my father proud. You know how it is." When you were young, all you wanted was love from your parents. I tried so hard to get my father to love me. I had done everything I could—I had destroyed lives for it, long after he was dead. "I didn't enjoy it, and I closed off." A coping mechanism. "I avoided my brother. By the time I was fourteen I could Bloodbend without my hands, any time. My father called me a prodigy." I was watching Lieu, but he wasn't watching me. He was staring at his hands "I don't know what I called myself."

 

This was more talking than I had done in days. My throat was starting to get sore in ways that not even water would fix. My tongue felt like cotton. Exhaustion was beginning to seep into my bones. But I had promised an explanation.

 

"When I was sixteen, my father took us out in a blizzard, far away from our home. He called it his final lesson—he ordered us to Bloodbend one another. I went first." I could still feel it in my blood, the sheer power that my Bending had had over my brother. The surge of happiness when I saw my father smile. And the bile in the back of my throat when my brother looked at me like I was a monster.

 

"Tarrlok refused. He swore to never do it again—we saw how that went." Much the same as my own promise had—the moment that terror and adrenaline had taken over we had done the first thing we had thought of to save ourselves. "My father got angry, insulted him. Threatened to hurt him. I…attacked my father."

 

Lieu snorted. "Your father was Yakone."

 

"He was still my father," and I had loved him. Pointlessly, stupidly. I had loved him. Coughing, I closed my eyes. "It was all…spur of the moment. I was sixteen. I didn't think ahead. I asked my brother to run away. He refused, he wanted to stay with our mother. I called him a weakling…and ran away into the storm. I nearly died. I was a very different person on the other side."

 

It was quiet for a long time. I could feel exhaustion eating at me from the inside and I lay breathing on the pillow, trying not to think about how much pain I was in. I hadn't been awake long enough before now to really feel it, but everything about me hurt, lots of it itched. Sleep seemed so nice.

 

"You were sixteen. We all do stupid things when we're sixteen." I heard Lieu stand and walk, the floorboards creaking, banging things on the stove. "Thank you for telling me."

 

"I should have done it earlier."

 

"You did it now." There was the flare of a match and it went very quiet for a while, the only sound the flame and the slow boil of something in a pot. Finally there was the clank of something being moved and some clicking—spoon into a bowl, most likely—and the footsteps approached back and Lieu sat on the bed, the mattress sagging under his weight. I opened my eyes and looked over at him. My eyelids felt like they were half-sewn shut.

 

"Thank you. You want me to call you Amon?"

 

"Noatak died in a blizzard. Amon got hit by a car." I dragged my mouth into a half-smile. "I like Amon more."

 

"Me too." Lieu smiled. Just a little bit. There was still pain behind his eyes, but he was smiling. And that was something. "Let's get some food in you."

 

 

 

Over the next several days I woke up more often, drank lots of water, ate plenty of broth. Slowly, even though the burns all over my body were healed, I could feel my strength returning. I slept less and more fitfully, but I continued to recover. However, for all the health I regained, Lieu got worse.

 

At the end of the first week, he started coughing blood.

 

 

 

The eighth day I awoke in the late afternoon to find Lieu sitting very still in the chair by the table, his head rolled back over the back of the chair, his eyes closed, lips parted. He looked so much worse than he had when I had first woken up—his skin was sagging around his eyes, tinged yellow. His lips were dry and cracked. His abdomen was so distended that if he had been a woman I would have wondered if he was pregnant.

 

There was something very, very wrong.

 

"Lieu," I whispered, my voice cracking. He didn't move—as far as I could tell he wasn't breathing. My heart started pounding in my ears. "Lieu—" louder this time, but he still didn't stir.

 

There was a water pitcher on the table next to him. Shaking, I lifted my left arm, teeth clenched, taking shallow breaths, and _pulled._ For a moment nothing happened and then I could start to feel it, tugging at my senses. There was a very small splash. I did it again, my jaw creaking, and this time I saw it clear the edge of the pitcher.

 

The third time I managed to get enough water out that I threw it sideways and it smacked into Lieu's face and he awoke with a startled, hoarse shout. He stood up so fast his chair fell over and then he started coughing hard, doubled over, leaning hard on the side of the table, water dripping off of his hair as he pressed one hand to his side, the fingers of the other white-knuckled on the wood. He coughed until there was a spot of blood on the floor and he shook, leaning against the table, and turned toward me.

 

"What?" He whispered, blindly reaching for the water pitcher, pouring some into the cup on the table, drinking it with trembling fingers.

 

"You weren't breathing," my throat hurt to speak. Lieu just kept staring at me. I lifted my left hand, half-shrugged. "I can't move."

 

"Don't—" Lieu began, and then coughed again. Since our conversation about my father, and my past, we had hardly talked. Just him asking me how I was, how I felt. Me asking for water and food. That was it—whatever rapport we had held between us before was long gone. It had been lost the moment he stared at my back and called me a traitor. The moment I had attacked the one person who had promised to never attack me. "No." It fell silent between us, the only noise his laboured breathing, and then I hesitated, pointed awkwardly toward the cup he held.

 

"Water,"

 

"Yeah." Lieu refilled the cup, set the pitcher back down, and started toward the bed. On the third step, right next to the edge of the mattress, he started coughing again, stumbling, dropping the cup—it hit the ground and half-bounced, water splashing everywhere. Lieu slid further forward, propped one arm on the wall, the other over his mouth as he kept coughing into the crook of his elbow until he was half-doubled over, tears leaking from the edges of his eyes, and the fit finally subsided and he lowered his arm.

 

"Lieu—" I began as he looked down at the white cloth of his shirt. The entire inside of his elbow was stained crimson. He didn't look toward me.

 

"It's nothing," he mumbled, glancing toward me for a moment, our eyes meeting, before he looked away again. Lieu shook his head. "It's nothing."

 

"It is not." I had used up a lot of energy when we had talked about my family, and it had taken a surprising amount of concentration just to throw some water on his face—I didn't have much to begin with. I couldn't waste it talking. "How long." Lieu half opened his mouth to reply and then started coughing again, this time into the back of his hand, and when it subsided again, he hung his head.

 

"Since the Arena." My bones felt cold.

 

This was what I had done to him, when I hadn't been paying any attention to how I used my unwanted powers. And I hadn't noticed before now because I was too weak—he wasn't close enough. "The woman that healed you tried to do something but…"

 

"Internal." I knew what it was. I hadn't been thinking, or concentrating. That was the thing about Bloodbending—if you didn't have enough of your attention put into it, one tiny slip up, one twitch of the finger and you could irreparably break someone.

 

"Yes."

 

The feeling of knowing that I had killed the love of my life was cold, sobering, all-encompassing guilt that settled at the top of my spine like ice. The silence stretched between us long and strained, and finally I closed my eyes.

 

I had done it, and I would be damned if I didn't _fix_ it. Because I was the only person that could. Groaning, I slowly shoved with my left shoulder and fell over onto my back, my eyes closing as I gasped with the pain of it. There was no doubt my back was the worst burned. I opened my eyes.

 

"Most healing doesn't work on internal wounds," I said, carefully regulating my breathing, going over the lessons my father had taught me as a child—staying calm made you more powerful, we were not Firebenders, relying on our anger. We were the water, as calm as a placid lake but with untouched depths and the raging force of the sea. I shifted, dragged my arms around until my hands we are palms-up, resting on my chest. "Healing relies on the body's own Chi flow. It can't penetrate that deep safely." I coughed as I resettled, wincing—my back hadn't hurt this much before, but now that all my weight was on it every breath made stabbing pains dig deep. It was raw and it hurt like _hell._ "During the war, Katara tried to use it to heal internal wounds. She later developed a method to stop bleeding but…" that was all. Looking down, until our eyes met, Lieu watching me with an expression of mixed bemusement and hurt. 

 

It was amazing he had even wanted to look at me, let alone carry me for two days, to save my life, to care for me, after what I had done to him.

 

"I can fix it." I finally said, and Lieu narrowed his eyes.

 

"You can't heal, you told me yourself." Not like that would be able to fix this issue.

 

"Not healing." I hesitated. There was no good way to say this, and I finally glanced to the side—I couldn't look into those eyes, the colour of an early morning sky just before dawn. I couldn't see his reaction. "I could…bend everything back to where it belongs."

 

It was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop until finally he took a deep breath and snarled—

 

"You were the one that _did_ this to me." I closed my eyes, winced. It was true. "Amon, you tried to kill me." I tried to open my mouth, to deny it, and then closed it again—because I couldn't deny it. I had, even if I hadn't meant to. I had reacted on instinct and in fear and I had hurt the one person I had left. And if I didn't rectify it, I wouldn't have tried to kill him. I would have killed him, through my own inaction, my stupidity, and my fear. "We're not doing this. You're not using that crap ever again." Lieu frowned, expression closed off. "Especially not around me."

 

He shifted, preparing to stand, and I closed my eyes, felt my heart sinking. So that was it, then. Lieu was going to die. Because of me. Because I couldn't save him.

 

"Please," I whispered, my fingers curling in towards my palms. "Please. I—" I what? "Need you." No, that was wrong. I had _needed_ him to be my Lieutenant, my strong right arm. I had _needed_ him to watch my back in a fight. I had _needed_ him for plenty of things but that had never fixed our relationship or made it any stronger.

 

Now I needed him for other things. Half of my soul was his, my life belonged to him. He had saved me. He had rescued me from death's doorstep. And for twenty years he had shared all my meals, my bed, my laughter, my sorrow, my dreams, my desires. But that wasn't what was important.

 

"I can't let you die because of me," I whispered, my voice hoarse. I opened my eyes, looked back at him. "Because you dedicated your life to me—now let me do the same for you. _Let me._ "

 

Lieu stared back at me, a conflicting war of emotions in the depths of his eyes, and then finally growled, "So help me—" but he finally slumped a bit, and sighed. He was in too much pain at the moment—he didn't seem to want to fight. "Fine." He shifted closer. "Where do you want me."

 

"I can't move my arms. Above me." We had been in this position plenty of times before. All I could think about was _where do you want me,_ whispered as my fingers combed through his hair and we came together, bodies slotting like puzzle pieces meant to fit with love and lust. I could imagine the feel of him above me, the tension, and the half-said praise between us. But not this time. Instead, I held very still while Lieu shifted, planting his knees on either side of my waist, his calves running alongside my thighs, and he moaned quietly in pain. He had probably been sleeping sitting up to alleviate the pressure—this couldn't have been particularly comfortable. Lieu continued, settling closer, hands on either side of my shoulders and elbows bent, our foreheads almost touching.

 

That _almost_ was half an inch and a gulf as wide as Yue Bay in terms of what it meant for what broken shards remained of our relationship.

 

Looking down to make sure I didn't hurt him, I untucked the bottom of his shirt from the top of his slacks and slid my fingers up under it. Short, wiry black hair brushed over the pads of my fingers, the few raised marks of scars, all of which I could put a name and a date to—including the large ones stretching around his side from where the Avatar's dog had clawed him, healed now, and I would have been able to feel the solid shapes of his muscles if his body hadn't been so bent out of shape.

 

Literally.

 

Lieu's breathing quickened and I glanced back up. "Relax," I whispered. "It will make it easier."

 

"That's a hell of a request," Lieu growled back, scowling. His head hung and he looked exhausted—I almost wished he would put his face into the crook of my neck, to feel the edges of his profile press against my skin. What skin I had left. "You say that to me after _you_ did this, you were the one that pulled me into the air, that crushed me, you tossed me thirty feet, didn't even look, you sure as hell didn't seem to care th—"

 

"Please." My voice broke. My throat felt suddenly thick and my eyes ached. "Lieu, please." I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream and cry until everything hurt and I couldn't anymore. But there were no tears, I had none. They were gone. My fingers curled and my jaw clenched.

 

We hadn't fought like this in the entire time we were together. Even when things had been at their worst between us, Lieu had never been vindictive. When we did really, truly, explosively argue (knock-down-drag-out-sleep-on-the-couch) there was always love. Worry, desire, exhaustion—some combination of true emotion that kept us from sniping at each other.

 

Except whatever that was, it was gone. It vanished the moment I looked him in the eyes and said _You served me well, Lieutenant._ There was a hole in my chest and it tasted like bitter regret. Regret, and the poignant bile of guilt.

 

"I…sorry," Lieu finally said. It was a quiet mumble, and I started moving my fingers again, still not able to look at him, concentrating instead on what I felt. There was internal bleeding—not terrible and not overly significant, but it would kill him all the same if enough time passed. All of his organs were out of place, some twisted uncomfortably (how had he been eating, breathing, digesting, this was _bad_ ) and others entirely crammed. His kidneys weren't where they belonged, his intestines twisted, his stomach crushed.

 

It was all the more sobering to know that I had done this.

 

Me.

 

With my own two hands.

 

"Don't move," I warned softly, and he caught his breath, stilling, as I closed my eyes and pursed and frowned. And then I started to work. Lieu gasped in surprise and then froze again, his fingers clenching in the sheets, as I let out a slow breath and started untwisting the knot of his guts. "This won't be fun." I added.

 

He grunted.

 

And it was quiet. At first fixing the mess was just an aching tiredness, Lieu calmly taking it with nothing more than laboured breaths, and after about ten minutes the headache started to build behind my eyes, overusing my Bending while I was still too weak. But I had to do this—first, returning everything where it belonged and loosening too-tight muscles, returning his skin to its usual elasticity, and closing off the internal injuries that were causing him to bleed. 

 

I could hear my heartbeat, and my body hurt. I was wearing down quickly, getting tired. Getting slow. There wasn't much more I could do. My eyelids were heavy and finally my hands slid down from his side and I let out a shaky sigh.

 

"There," I whispered, and Lieu shifted away, feeling his chest. His breathing sounded easier but he winced and grunted suddenly.

 

"Is that a knot of blood—" he began, and I swallowed.

 

"Sterilise a knife and bring me the water pitcher."

 

Lieu looked back at me. He seemed scared for a moment.

 

"You don't know how to heal."

 

"My father always said the best way to learn is to do."

 

"Are you seriously going to ask me to—"

 

"Just do it," my voice resigned, I closed my eyes. Lieu's feet creaked as he stood and carefully moved across the floor. A drawer opened, a drawer closed, and I heard a match strike, the sudden smell of the burn in the air and the quiet sound of it licking at something—a blade. Two more matches struck. His feet approached and he hesitated by the table, and then the water pitcher moved, and Lieu was standing by me.

 

He set the pitcher down on the floor and I looked over, opened my eyes.

 

He was staring at the knife. It was a small paring one, for slicing vegetables. He glanced toward me and our eyes met.

 

"Do you seriously know what you're doing," Lieu asked. His voice shook. There was almost fear in his eyes. "This could kill me."

 

"It will if we don't," I grit my teeth. I hadn't the faintest idea what I was doing. And here he was, trusting me.

 

That was Lieu's greatest gift. _Trust._ He had always trusted, sometimes to a fault. He had followed me blindly and never once questioned my thoughts and my desires. He had believed in me, known me and yet not. He was my closest friend and my oldest companion and even after I had lied and broke his soul and destroyed everything—he had trusted me on the beach. He had brought me here. Trusted him to save his life with the very power that had nearly ended it.

 

And now he was watching me, with a knife in his own hand, and fear in his eyes and in his expression. Even when he shouldn't have trusted me at all. If I had wanted to, I could have told him now to stab himself and killed him through it. If I had been that kind of person, but I wasn't. I never would be. He couldn't know that for certain, though.

 

"Bring the chair," my voice was surprisingly quiet, cracking, as he carefully lowered the knife and tugged over the chair, closer to my arms, and helped me roll onto my side, once more off the burns (the pain was still there, but not as solidly present and clogging the back of my throat as it had been) and held the knife in one hand.

 

"Where?"

 

Stretching my right arm out, the explosion of pain behind my eyes was enough that my vision greyed with it. "No—" slid from between my lips without even meaning to and I was too tired to scream in surprise. It felt like part of the muscle of my shoulder was _gone._ Just missing. 

 

"Amon—" Lieu grabbed for me and I shook my head sharp and quick, swallowing convulsively. Oh _god._ But my pain didn't matter. Biting the inside of my cheek until it bled, a pain that was sharper and more present and I could concentrate on, I finished reaching out and pressed my fingers to his side, away from anything particularly vital, and tugged the blood stuck in his system there until it was almost like a knot, and dug them solidly into his skin.

 

"Here."

 

I glanced up and our eyes met.

 

Lieu looked terribly shaken, and looked down at the knife he had pointed toward his side. He laughed shakily.

 

"Y-You know, for all the times I've beaten other people to hell and to back…I've never actually purposefully injured myself." He stopped laughing. There was terror behind his eyes. "Eight days ago I wanted to kill you or cry or—and now here I am. About to stab myself and trusting you to save me."

 

"I would never let you die," the words were surprisingly honest. "Lieu, I owe you everything. My life. My soul. I would be a body in the sand if it weren't for you." Neither of us were blinking. "Love is one thing—I owe you a debt." That was all I had to say. I saw the determination close down in his expression.

 

I closed my eyes as he stabbed himself and grunted in pain, hissing, sobbing half-brokenly as I heard the knife slide into his skin. And then the hilt clattered to the ground, my eyes opening and he had one hand pressed on top of it and things moved very fast. I was too exhausted, too incoherent, to think about it.

 

First, I tugged as fast as I could and jerked all the blood out of his wound, pulling it free, and it splattered loudly to the ground, even as I twitched my other hand and send the water out of the pitcher and into the palm of my right one, and I jerked forward, pressed my palm against his skin, the water cool and wonderful on my fingers through the bandages. Lieu was gasping quick breaths, my eyes still closed, as I pushed his fingers out of the way.

 

The water stayed water for a moment, nothing changing. And then I felt it, pounding just below his skin—like a force, running through him, swimming in his stomach. The Chi was everywhere, I had just never listened enough before. And I could almost hear the sound as the water got thicker, different, and his skin knit up. The blade hadn't gone any deeper than skin level, which was good, because the moment I felt it knit the water slid from my fingers.

 

The blackness behind my eyes was absolute, and the last thing that I heard before unconsciousness took me completely was Lieu saying _"Thank you,"_ quietly, and completely honestly.

 

If I had had time to think about it, I would have realised that it wasn't just him I had started to fix. It was us, too.


	5. Chapter Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s a lot to a relationship. There’s a give and a take, a pull and a push. And sometimes, just when you think you’ve lost it all, a little bit can go a long way.
> 
> The Lieutenant finds Amon half-dead after Tarrlok explodes their boat, and nurses him back to health. They’re a long way from what they were, but that doesn’t really matter, because they’ve started to become something else. Something better.
> 
> It’s a hard road, and they’ve got a long way to walk—but wherever they go, they’re going together.

Nightmares were always a common enough thing in our house. I would get them, my sister's face, screaming as the group of Firebenders burned and killed her. My mother, dying a shell of a woman, whispering my father's name. And me, alone.

 

Amon had his own, of which he never spoke. At first, when he was younger, when we first met, he would wake up screaming in the other bed in our shared apartment, sobbing a woman's name and apologising, over and over again, and he would stare at me across the space between our beds, his grey-blue eyes wide, almost luminescent in the moonlight, and whisper, _I'm so cold. I'm so cold._ I would lift up the edge of my blankets and he would come over and curl up on the edge of my bed, fit along the side of my body, as if that was somehow warm enough.

 

They changed more through the years than mine did. Mine were always the same—my sister, eternally fourteen. Later my brother, imagined as an adult with my father's face, accusing me of leaving them alone. My father, with my face, whispering how I was never good enough for my namesake.

 

But in his twenties, Amon would thrash, kick me in his sleep, scream in his native tongue of which I didn't understand a word. Cower behind raised hands, like he was tugging on strings. Shake, sweat, and only wake up when I soothed him, and then cling to me—eyes wide, leaking silent tears, fingers curled tight enough in the skin of my shoulders and back that there would be crescent-shaped marks there for days before they healed.

 

In his thirties, he started to get quiet, since we were no longer alone in our apartment—we were underground, and the walls weren't as thick as they could be, or in a safehouse with walls paper-thin that anyone could hear through. He would lay very still and curl tighter and tighter, crying out softly in his sleep, until I would whisper him awake, talk him out of the dream, and he would look at me with bloodshot, hooded eyes like he had never seen me before, and then cup my face and whisper, over and over, _I didn't mean to. I would never. I love you. I love you. I love you._

 

I never found out what it was he didn't mean to do. What it was he would never do—he never told me. In the morning the mask would be back on and the only sign that there was another sleepless night was that he would slump slightly, posture broken, and reach into his hood to rub at his temples, at the bridge of his nose, and ask for an extra pot of tea. If it was bad enough, he would wait until we were alone and turn toward me, lean against my shoulder.

 

 _I need you._ He would whisper, one hand tangling with mine. _I can't do it without you._

 

 _I know,_ I promised it more times than I can count. 

 

It wasn't until he actually turned the darkest parts of himself on me that I knew what it was he had nightmares about. And then I began to understand.

 

—— Chapter Four : ——

_Ere we will eat our meal in fear and sleep_

_In the affliction of these terrible dreams_

_That shake us nightly._

_[ MacBeth, Act III, Scene ii ]_

 

When the nightmares finally started again, I had been expecting them for several weeks. There was plenty more to wake him up screaming than there had ever been before. Some of it I didn't even know myself—like how he had come to be laying on the beach, burned half to hell and back. But I was expecting the nightmares. That was easy enough to see coming.

 

It had been a month since Amon had washed up on the shore, and he was healing, albeit slowly. On the third week that we were in the house I was finally able to unwrap his right ankle, the burns at last healed over there for the most part (they weren't as bad as they had been anywhere else, protected by his boots) and the next morning I had gone into town and retrieved a mirror to show him what it looked like.

 

It wasn't pretty, but Amon took it without batting an eyelash. With that fixed he could finally start the long road to actual recovery—no more chamber pots and being stuck in bed, I could now help him make his slow way across the farm house to the back door and that mess could be done out there.

 

Not that that was any more attractive, but that was life.

 

At the same time, the rest of his burns started to get better. His left hand was fully healed just as the end of the first month passed and I was able to take the bandages off to the wrist, and sometimes I would catch him out of the corner of my eye, holding it in front of his face, turning it back and forth, watching the way the red lines spiderwebbed across the backs of his fingers, curling his hand into a fist and examining the way the scars tightened. 

 

And, as he got better, so did I. 

 

Whatever he had done had healed me. There would always be a scar on my side now, from where I had stabbed myself, but it was a small trade to make for my life. And the gulf between us started to shrink.

 

I started to smile.

 

 

 

It was the full moon. Now that the pressure in my chest was abated I didn't have to sleep sitting up anymore, and when I had gotten the mirror from town I had picked up a bedroll as well—I slept on the floor next to Amon's bed. I had slept worse places. I listened to his quiet breathing at night.

 

It started at what was probably half past midnight, the moon high in the sky and slanting silver light through the windows. I was sound asleep, dreamless, when I heard the moan. Almost instantly I was awake, blinking my eyes, trying to get my bearings as the bed next to me rattled, shaking. Another soft groan of pain and I sat up, shaking my head to clear my thoughts, turning to look at the bed.

 

He had knotted himself into the blanket. It was not the first time Amon had done this while particularly shaken in his sleep. He was still whining under his breath, in pain and terror, and I grabbed his left thigh, one of the few unburned parts of him, and shook. "Amon," my voice was hoarse and gravelly with sleep.

 

"Tarrlok." He whispered, twisting away from me. "I only did it because I had t—"

 

"Amon," I stopped shaking his leg, scrambled up onto one knee, and pulled myself onto the edge of the bed. "Amon, wake up." His eyes were scrunched tight, his lips, ragged and torn as they were, were dragged into a grimace of pain. "Amon—hey—"

 

 _"I killed him and he's all I have,"_ he sobbed. I froze, my hand half an inch from his left shoulder. He did it again, this great ragged heave of breath. "All I have." It was mumbled now, as the worst of the nightmare started to recede. He only ever spoke in his sleep when it got particularly bad. "He loved me…" it trailed off into silence. Emptiness.

 

My hand was frozen half above his shoulder and my breath had caught in my lungs. Amon was still shaking, sweating, and I pulled myself fully onto the bed, reached out, and hesitantly stroked the side of his face, ran my hand down to his left one, brushed the back of his palm. "Wake up," I commanded, quietly.

 

Amon woke up, his eyes wide and bright in the darkness, bright blue in the moonlight. He stared up at me, mouth hanging slack as he tried to think of something to say, and then hesitantly turned his hand over. I didn't stop him, but he didn't lace our fingers—just curled his fingers around my palm, our thumbs next to each other. It was very quiet.

 

If I hadn't just heard what he had said in his sleep, I would have pulled away. It was one thing to know that he had said sorry, thanking me for saving his life. Another to hear him whisper in his sleep that I was it. Me. That was all. 

 

"What happened with you and your brother," That was what his dream had clearly been about—speaking to his brother. It would only get better if he talked about it. "Before I found you." Amon had told me about his family and his history, but not about why I had found him and Tarrlok half-dead and dead respectively on a beach, burned beyond recognition, in the remains of a boat. I could ascertain that they were getting out of the city together, that something had happened, and that there was an explosion. But that was all.

 

"I…" the word caught in his throat, and I bent over and tugged the water pitcher over from the chair it was on, took a ladle, and helped him sit up to drink it. "After the Arena, I went back to Air Temple Island." Amon looked away, toward the rest of the room. I could almost see his thoughts moving with the sluggish aftermath of sleep—he was a speaker, he was looking for the right words to use. "I got my brother because…you were gone. Tarrlok was everything. All I had left. I asked him to run away with me. We took the getaway boat, and I…"

 

I tightened the grip of my hand on his, squeezed his palm, rubbed my thumbs over the burns on the back of his hand and over the raised bumps of his tendons and knuckles as he squeezed back.

 

"He took one of the gloves and blew up the gas tank. To stop me, or himself. I don't really know. I could feel him doing it. I didn't know where I was going anyway—I deserved to die. I _wanted_ to—it wasn't worth it, not with you gone, our dreams gone. I didn't stop him." Amon's eyes closed. "I was so angry with myself. Lying for the Equalists was one thing…lying to you was another." Amon let out a slow, quiet sigh. I could see the muscles of his jaw clench, his teeth grinding together through the ragged hole that had been part of his lips once, his eyes squeeze shut. "I could have killed you," he whispered, voice hoarse and quiet.

 

"But you didn't," I replied. He gave me a very slight nod of acknowledgement, face still turned into the pillow. "That counts for something. Neither of us were thinking clearly. You could have, and you didn't."

 

"I could never have done that." He meant every word. "You're all I have. Ever had. Everything. And you found out, after everything, and that pain in your voice was from me and—" Amon swallowed, a great gulping sound, and opened his eyes, staring into the sheets, glanced over and up at me until our eyes met. There was a slight sheen of wetness to his eyes, like he was about to cry, but couldn't. Too much had been burned away. "You saved me. Even though I hurt you. And you're taking care of me, even though you owe me nothing."

 

"Yeah." My voice was quiet. I squeezed his hand in mine. "I know." Amon was right, of course—I _didn't_ owe him anything. But that changed nothing about the years he shared my bed, combed his fingers through my hair, held my hand, smiled, laughed, shared my personal space and my hopes and my dreams. That changed nothing about how much I loved him, every stupid inch of him, even the part that had almost killed me. His blood with Tarrlok and his father might have been thicker than the water he was born to Bend, but our love was stronger than any hate. We held eye contact for a moment longer and then it got very silent. There was nothing else to say.

 

"I'm sorry," Amon whispered. His lips shook. A single tear slid from the side of one eye, a mixture of pain and regret and guilt. "I'm so sorry."

 

"I know." I paused. He was waiting for the other shoe or the axe to drop, his lower lip shaking slightly, his fingers curling tight against mine. I knew that if he could have, there would have been more tears. And finally— "I forgive you."

 

Saying it felt at the same time like something squeezed my heart and a weight had lifted from my shoulders. Amon's expression cleared slightly, an almost-smile at the corners of his eyes (I could imagine that expression before his skin had been burned away—the wrinkles beside his eyes wrinkling as they half-closed, his smile just slightly too wide for his lips, dragging his cheeks up and making the lines dug into his cheeks fold. The half-laugh before he would cover his face one-handed and lean into my shoulder and just keep smiling, chuckling) but it stopped, before it ever got any further than that. It wasn't the right time to smile. It was just a look of adoration, and understanding.

 

Neither of us moved until his eyes closed and he fell back asleep, and I eventually slid into unconsciousness too, still sitting up and holding his hand, tight in mine. And that was enough—that was all we had to say.

 

 

 

Six weeks in both his hands were unbandaged, although he had asked me to keep wrapping them so that the skin didn't dry out, and I was finally able to proclaim his thigh mostly healed, although his back, right shoulder, and head were still nowhere near out of the woods yet. Conversations started again—he asked me to describe where we were, to read him pieces of information from the newspapers, while he lay on his side or his chest, avoiding his back. He couldn't sit up or walk on his own, but he could move his left arm, get water from the pitcher beside the bed without me, and soon enough—

 

"I am never eating broth _again,_ " I growled, tossing the pan on the stove. There was a dry chuckle from the bed. "Seriously," I glanced over my shoulder at him. "It might be all you've been able to stomach, but I've been missing real food."

 

"If I get sick from this I get to laugh at you." The nightmares had cleared the air between us. It was easier to talk now.  Our rapport might not be back, but we could laugh. Smile. Things were starting to feel _right_ again, even if there was so much we hadn't talked about. There was so much left to heal, even if the rawest of the wounds had finally closed between us.

 

"Yeah," I grunted, turning the pan to the side and scraping out the vegetables onto a plate. Carefully picking out the easy to chew and digest ones for him, the rest for me, I put them atop the two bowls of rice (his smaller than mine) and came back over. It was plain food, but it was good food. "Eating something substantive will probably help." Setting down the bowls on the table, I picked up my bedroll and pillow from the floor and carefully took his left shoulder, helped him sit up, and wedged both under his back. It was healed enough he could lean on it for short periods of time, which made things like eating significantly easier, and he settled back onto the makeshift prop, waiting for me to hand him the bowl and a spoon before he held it in his right hand and started eating with his left, wincing slightly as he got used to the shift and pull of the muscles again.

 

I sat on the chair next to the bed and we ate in silence. It took Amon twice as long as it took me to chew every bite, slowly re-learning how the muscles in his mouth, some of them now gone, worked, and making sure he didn't accidentally spill anything out his half-charred lips. But it tasted fine, and he seemed happy. 

 

When we were both done I set the bowls on the table and leaned back in the chair, sighing. The fields on the farm, left neglected for twenty-odd years since my brother had left, were a terrible mess to clean up. I'd been paying to make sure the place stayed as ours, but only the house had really been in any usable shape, and probably because there had been squatters in and out. As it stood, this main room was the only one that was inhabitable—and I had had to patch the roof as soon as Amon had fixed up the internal damage. Still, I had cleared one smaller field, the one by the house (more like a garden) totally, and I was about a quarter way through one of the larger two in the front, the ostritchhorse helping immensely. I'd had to build myself a makeshift plough to avoid spending money, but it worked well enough.

 

Amon sighed and rolled onto his side to avoid leaning too much more on his back, and watched me, his hands folded on the bed. "This is your family's farm."

 

"Was. Mine now." I half-shrugged. "I've been paying the lease on the place since my brother left for Ba Sing Se." Amon had been living with me when my brother had left, but we had never really talked about it—for the same reason we had never talked about his family, I supposed. If to a lesser extent. Neither of us wanted to think about it. I didn't want to think about my sister. "So…ours, I guess."

 

He watched me, and finally, "What happened to your sister? I remember when she died but—" Amon trailed off and I looked down at my hands, let out a shaking breath. I had never wanted to talk about that. He had told me about his family. I might as well talk about mine.

 

"My…father, his name was Li Long Nan. He was in the Fire Nation army during the Hundred Year War. He was at the Siege of Ba Sing Se, fought alongside the Dragon Of The West's son, Lu Ten. He was there when Lu Ten died. He moved into the Fire Nation Colonies after the war ended, and lived a pretty simple life, working as a mercenary and a guard. He met my mother later…he was in his fifties, she was twenty five, but you know how it goes." I waved one hand. "They fell madly in love, got married immediately, started a farm, and I was born right away. Four years later, my brother was born, and four years after that my younger sister.

 

"My parents named me after Lu Ten. In his honour—he saved my Father's life, so you know, an in memoriam type thing. But we lived in the Earth Kingdom, so they changed it to Lieu Te." I laughed, humourlessly, and rubbed at my moustache. "My brother got the Firebending, my sister the Earthbending. I was the only one of us that didn't. It was always awkward—they named me after the Fire Nation hero, and I couldn't Bend. The anomaly. My mother couldn't either but still, it was awkward."

 

"I'm sorry," Amon said, quietly.

 

"That one isn't your fault." I looked over at him. He was watching me, with almost far-away eyes. "My father passed away when I was twelve, and my mother five years later—they were very in love, I think she only stuck around because there were the three of us to worry about. I was seventeen then, old enough to fend for myself and take care of the family, and I left for Republic City two weeks after her funeral. I sent home money and my brother took care of my sister. And then, right after you moved in with me…there was a group of Firebenders in town, they started exhorting my siblings. My brother was only sixteen, my sister was twelve—they couldn't really fight back, although my brother tried.

 

"They waited until my brother was in town getting food and snuck out here, and kidnapped my sister. They demanded a ransom but…it was more than we could pay." I rubbed at my eyes—I had scraped together everything I had, every last cent. Begged Amon for what he had made as a radio operator, and sent it all home. Everything. They had turned it down—he still remembered the emergency telegraph his brother had sent. "My brother woke up the next morning to find a clump of her hair and a note to get off our land. He refused—they found her remains a week later, charred and left in a barn in town." My throat felt tight. I remembered every word of my brother's telegraph. They had only burned her face—her mouth had been wide in a scream. They'd left all her clothes on—the blood hadn't even dried on her thighs when they found her.

 

My eyes felt wet. It was twenty years ago. I couldn't stop thinking about her face—Yui, lost and alone. Without anyone, afraid and scared. Wondering when we were going to come and get her. Crying my name. Crying for our parents. And I had failed. _Failed._

 

"Lieu—" Amon said my name. Quietly. I heard his hand rustle on the sheets and I turned as he stretched it out for me. I hesitated, and then reached for it and he laced our fingers together, tugged lightly, pulled on my arm until I got up and sank down onto the edge of the bed, and he leaned forward, pressed his head to my temple. "You did everything you could."

 

"I know." My voice cracked and I felt tears running down the side of my nose. "I know."

 

"I'm so sorry." Amon whispered, the second word cracking, and I turned my face, pressed it into his left shoulder, and silently cried.

 

 

 

The second month came, and for the first time, Amon was able to sit up by himself. Not easily and not for very long without something supporting his back, but it was a step in the right direction. All of his burns were finally closed for the most part as well, no longer leaking puss or anything of the sort, and now we were just waiting for them to stabilise before I risked letting them out into the air—even if the ones on his face weren't fully healed.

 

And, on the third day of the second month, the money I had finally ran out. It had been enough for one last shopping trip into town, but that was it. I walked back from town, the bag with our food slung over my shoulder, my footsteps loud in the dirt. There was so much we really needed to make a new start—I had been buying mostly essentials up to this point, wearing the one pair of clothes I had and washing it in the stream by the house, but bandages and food and burn salve wasn't going to be it. We had a farm, and it was getting to be planting season—we would need seeds to plant. And I needed some new clothes. _Amon_ needed some clothes in general, since anything near as tight as the clothes I had brought from Republic City would probably be terrible for his burns—and what he did have would need to cover more skin, since the burns wouldn't do well in direct sunlight. Shoes, farm equipment, more feed for our singular ostritchhorse…a lot of things.

 

And tools, to rebuild the parts of the house that weren't exactly in living condition.

 

Walking back from town, I turned the bend that led to our farm and looked up at it.

 

Here was where I had grown up. It was very well situated—my father had been quite well off when he had married my mother, from years of working as a guard and a mercenary, and had spent most of his money buying this farm for them to live on. There were four fields and one garden plot, the garden plot by the house, two medium fields in front between the house and the road for growing plenty of different kinds of crops, one long thin rice paddy beside the river (dried up from years of disuse, it would take some work to get it working again), and one large one in the back—for growing large crops, like wheat and corn. It was situated directly on one of the medium-sized rivers in the area, with a water wheel. Here where I stood on the path there was enough room for a cart or a wagon or a carriage to drive by, and on the other side of the path there was a small forest.

 

The house was situated on a hill overlooking all the area, and as I stepped up the small path that ran between the two fields (the garden plot was clear, and one field was) and began to climb, I felt a smile half-touch my lips.

 

My father had built the house with the help of my mother and her brothers. It had started off as one large room, although by the time I was born they had added a workroom and a second bedroom, and through the years, more got added on. By the time my sister was born, the main room had become solely the kitchen and dining room—there was a small sitting room on the left side of the house along with the room my siblings shared, the workroom, the storage room, and my bedroom on the right, and on the back one larger bedroom that my parents slept in. My father had built a shed on the edge of the land not covered by the fields, as well as a separate outhouse in the back, and there was a goosehencoop, long since fallen into utter disrepair, that my sister had kept a small flock of birds in, the eggs of which we had eaten every morning. There was a water pump just outside the side door of the kitchen, and a grain storage tower that was halfway fallen down beside the outhouse, as well as a small picket that I had rebuilt first thing, for the ostritchhorse to live in.

 

Most of the house was toppled now, the roof fallen in at some points, whole walls down at others, but the outlines of all the rooms were still standing. It was a start. It was something to go off of. A place to rebuild on our own.

 

Toeing off my shoes, now grown dusty from the time spent outside (they were city shoes, not country sandals) I pushed open the door and set down the bag on the counter and turned—

 

I almost dropped the bag in my haste. Amon had fallen off of the bed—fallen, or climbed—and was leaning against the table, currently in the act of contemplating his feet.

 

"What did you do—" I ran forward, kneeling beside him, and he looked up at me.

 

"Trying to go to the bathroom," he shrugged and gave me a pained smile. "My legs did not work as well as I thought they would. So I ended up over here." I stared at him and then sighed long-sufferingly.

 

"Let me help you." One arm wrapped around his back, I helped tug him out from under the table and to his feet, pulling him upward until he balanced awkwardly on his left leg, avoiding putting weight on his right one, and we carefully limped over to the side door and I held it open, helped him outside, and in respect for his privacy, looked off to the side while he fumbled with the bandages on his hip and the slacks he wore, his from republic city, until he got them open.

 

Neither of us said anything until he was done, and I helped him back inside and over to the bed, and he sat down gratefully, sitting up and carefully getting his left leg into bed before he dragged in his right, and I washed my hands and brought him a wet towel to do the same. He handed it back to me a moment later, and I rinsed it out and left it in the sink, rinsing my own hands again before I started unpacking the food.

 

"What did you get in town?" Amon asked from the bed.

 

"Some rice crackers, and some vegetables. Not much else." I turned around and brought them over to the table. "As well as some noodles. But listen—" I leaned against the edge of the table, crossed my arms. "I used the last of what money I brought with me today. We've got nothing else." I saw something shift in his eyes when I said _we._ "I only brought what was in my wallet—" and that had paid for the ostritchhorse, "And what we had at the safehouse by the Arena. We really need more if we're going to get an honest start here, though. For tools to rebuild the house, and seeds."

 

"What are you suggesting we do," Amon folded his hands and shifted, laying back down on his side. I was glad I didn't have to help him sit up and lay down anymore. "Can you earn some working at other farms."

 

"I was actually…" here was where things got weird. "Nobody in Republic City knows what I look like. I've kept up with the news and the Avatar is at the South Pole—she and her boyfriend are the only people who have actually seen my face." I had worn my mask almost all the time on base—Hiroshi was another, but he was in jail right now. "Nobody knows my name either. Not even Hiroshi—and I seriously doubt that they would actually freeze the accounts of someone named _Lieu Te Nan._ Seriously, that's one they would never think of."

 

And our account had a pretty good amount of money. It was all of our savings over the years, combined into one account about a decade before because Amon's name was getting to be too common, too many people knew who he was. And there was enough there to facilitate getting us started—to pay for plenty of tools, for seeds, to even hire other men in town to rebuild the house as best as we could. To buy another ostritchhorse and a real plough to clear the fields.

 

"I want to go back and get out what we have."

 

Amon stared at me.

 

"You want to go back to Republic City," he said at last, and then licked the insides of his lips, his mouth pulled into a frown. "And empty our account."

 

"Yes. I'll probably get some other stuff while I'm there too, to help clear up the house."

 

"What if you get caught?"

 

"Nobody knows what I look like, or my real name. The most memorable thing about me is my moustache and my voice, and there are plenty of other people with similar moustaches and as long as I avoid any cops nobody should be able to pick out my voice." I rubbed at my chin and shrugged. "I could work or borrow things from the neighbours, but we really need more than what we have—you've not been outside, but this place is a real mess. Now that you can sit up and at the very least _get out_ of bed, before we end up absolutely dirt poor, I was thinking I could go."

 

Amon was very quiet, rolled onto his back, and folded his hands on his stomach. He was clearly thinking over all the ways that this could go wrong, his strategic mind running over every possible scenario for failure, both here for him and for me.

 

"How long will it take," he asked, finally.

 

"Probably about three days. I'll take the ostritchhorse, get in, get out, and get back here. Four at the most." He nodded. "I can leave everything beside the bed for you—a pitcher and a bucket of water, the rice crackers."

 

"And the chamber pot," he added, long sufferingly. "And the mirror. I can't change my own bandages, but I can make sure everything is at least staying on."

 

"And the chamber pot and the mirror," I nodded.

 

"I think it will work." Amon looked back over to me. "When will you leave?"

 

"Just before dawn, tomorrow. I can probably make it into the city by mid-evening, sleep on the outskirts, and go in and get everything in the morning and head back. I'll probably be here sometime around noon on the third day."

 

Amon nodded.

 

"Will you be all right?" I asked, worry tinging my voice. He was still an invalid—trapped in his bed, almost unable to fend for himself.

 

Amon half-smiled back at me.

 

"I'll be fine."

 

I trusted him enough to believe him. In hindsight, I probably shouldn't have.


	6. Chapter Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s a lot to a relationship. There’s a give and a take, a pull and a push. And sometimes, just when you think you’ve lost it all, a little bit can go a long way.
> 
> The Lieutenant finds Amon half-dead after Tarrlok explodes their boat, and nurses him back to health. They’re a long way from what they were, but that doesn’t really matter, because they’ve started to become something else. Something better.
> 
> It’s a hard road, and they’ve got a long way to walk—but wherever they go, they’re going together.

_So what is our goal, anyway_. Lieu looked up at me from the table of our kitchen, where the first designs for our uniforms were sketched out, and he leaned back in the chair, crossed his arms. _A Non-Bender on the council? An end to Bending power? That won't stop the people in the Triads, or the others who abuse their skills._

I leaned against the kitchen counter. I had been thinking about this for a while—ever since the night where I had explained my idea for the Equalists into his shoulder while he tried very hard to stay awake, one palm on the small of my back, and given a half-asleep uh-huh to everything that I said. Folding my arms over my chest, I sighed and looked over his shoulder, at the edge of the window over our kitchen sink. _I've been thinking. I had an idea._ He shifted in his chair and settled against the back, one hand still resting on the tabletop, his other drumming fingers on the top of his thigh. _If it's possible for Chi blocking to temporarily remove use of Bending from one limb…what's stopping it form being able to last longer, and more completely?_

 _Like…what Avatar Aang did to Yakone and Fire Lord Ozai?_ I flinched slightly at the mention of my father, and then nodded.

 _Nobody but the Avatar can Energybend, but there must be some applicable way of using Chi Blocking to get a similar result._ And I had an idea, too—combine it with Bloodbending, and I could probably entirely block someone's connection to their Chi and Chakra—and actually stop them from Bending at all. It wouldn't have to be permanent, but if it lasted long enough, we could use it to turn the Benders to look at things more from our point of view. _Think about it,_ I unfolded my arms, started gesturing, and stood up further. _Say we cut off the Triads, and the Council. Six months that they can't bend—they have to lose everything they've used for half their lives to get around. They have to start from scratch. No more Bending to abuse or to help them get around. They're just like the rest of us_. Well, like most people.

I supposed I was the exception.

 _Once they get their Bending back, they will understand. They'll have seen the other side of the equation._ I clenched one fist. Lieu was watching me, his bright eyes thoughtful, and he finally said—

 _Could you do it?_ I paused. He had never been nearly as good at blocking Chi as I was—but I was so good because I could feel where they were more clearly, dodge and strike more easily. So my father's lessons had come in handy eventually.

_I think it's possible. I would have to try it._

Lieu smiled.

_I think we try it._

_—— Chapter Five : ——_   
_If you will not murder me for my love, let me be your servant._   
_[ Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene i ]_

I heard Lieu leave in the quiet of the following morning. Everything was set in easy reach of the bed, where I could get to it without much work, and he stepped out, the house creaking. I heard the ostritchhorse squawking as he saddled it, and then his grunt as he hopped up, the footsteps of his mount crunching in the dirt outside the house and walking away down the path.

Eventually it was silent again, and I fell into that half-sleep that you exist in when you don't want to wake up and you can't actually get all the way asleep again. When the sun rose fully so did I, and took a drink of water.

And found myself alone in the house. The silence was almost deafening.

Outside the window birds sang, loudly, loud enough that it made my head hurt a bit, and a lone cicada, out too early in the year, started buzzing and then silenced a few moments later. Lieu had been my near constant companion since I had woken up, and without him there—suddenly the silence felt crushing.

The first day I tried not to think. I ate breakfast. Did the uncomfortable business of the chamber pot. Spent half an hour pointlessly pulling water out of the pitcher and letting it splash back in, the sloshing loud in the empty house. Ate lunch, snacked on rice crackers. Took a long nap, woke up after dark, after moonrise.

And, at a certain point, I couldn't keep back the thoughts anymore.

 

With Lieu gone, I couldn't shake the feeling in my bones that was regret, terror, anger, and overwhelming turmoil. My soul, my thoughts, were like the ocean in the throes of some terrible storm, and the pit of my stomach was the whirlpool where all those nasty emotions ended up. Sucking deeper and deeper.

When Lieu had been there, I hadn't thought. I had watched him, heard him, listened, thought about him. But now that he was gone, I couldn't shake the feeling in my bones that he wouldn't come back.

Why had he saved me? I had done nothing to him but hurt him—cultivated the feelings between us with no malicious intent (because I was in love with him, had always been in love with him, would always be in love with him and if he hadn't saved me from that beach I would have died with tears in my eyes and an ache in my chest that was my love for him, not my remorse for my brother) but I had never told him the truth. They say that there is no such thing as a little white lie. You start with something small (I'm Amon.) and you end up with something so monstrously huge that there isn't even anywhere to start unravelling it because there isn't a knot anymore. Just lies. (I can't bend. I can't heal.)

And I had snowballed down the slope, and eventually found myself suffocating inside the tomb of snow and lies I had made for myself.

(My name is Amon and when I was a child my family was killed by Firebenders. They stole my face.)

I had lied to him. I had lied to him about everything. Who I was. My past. The parts of me that he trusted to run our creation, our Equalists, had been a lie. I had lied about everything except my love for him—and how could he know that I hadn't lied about that all along as well?

Hands folded on my chest, staring at the moonlight sliding through the window, I thought about it. I had tried, several times, to tell him the truth. Every time my words had caught in my throat and petered off and died before I had ever been able to say any of the truths I wanted to. I had advocated equality, and never given equality of understanding to the one person who deserved it most.

(I've lied all along. I'm sorry. My name is actually Noatak—I was born in the Northern Watertribe, my brother is Tarrlok and I am a Bloodbender. I never told you because I was afraid you would leave me. You probably should.)

It took a long time before I fell asleep, and even when I did, it was restless. I did not have good dreams that night.

 

I didn't wake until late the second day, closer to noon, and I lay limply in bed before I did the morning business, ate three rice cakes, had few drinks of water, and closed my eyes. It was hot. My bandages, never gone without changing this long, started to itch, my burns getting sweat on them. I kicked off the sheets, unwound the strips from around my hands and my ankle and thigh, where the burns were healed and I could get them off, and then lay sprawled on the bed and stared up at the ceiling.

The silence was deafeningly loud and endlessly thick and deep. I listened to my own breath, the beat of my own heart, and stared at my hands, the criss-cross of scars, and finally, with nothing better to do, tugged at the water in the pitcher, listened to it slosh.

Lieu had no reason to come back for me. He had every reason to just leave and let me rot. I had given him nothing to trust me, or to keep me. I was like a child, an invalid completely unable to care for himself, relying on Lieu to do everything for me—and on top of that, I had betrayed him. Totally. Utterly. And so far, I had done nothing to repay his love and trust for me except to apologise in the dark one night.

There had to be something that I could do to fix this gulf, this rift between us.

The mirror was sitting on the chair, just in reach of my arm, and I hesitated, reaching out to pick it up. I had avoided looking at my face in the mirror before now, but I rolled back onto the bed, mirror in hand, and lifted it.

There wasn't much to see. Lieu kept the bandages good and tight, but there were still a few areas visible. The few strands of what remaining hair that I had, sticking between the linen strips. The edges of my eyes, black and red, mottled and scarred. And then of course the half-melted bump where my nose had been, the bandages showing that particular contour very well. And of course my lips—if you just looked from the right side they just seemed terrifically burned, but from the left side…

There was just a hole of muscle where my lips had been. My teeth, white, stared out from between them. Everything else was hidden, even my ears. Lieu hadn't said anything, and never flinched when changing my bandages, but I knew that it wasn't pretty. I had felt the damage before with my own hands. I knew where the worst of it was on the rest of my body too, including the whole lump of missing muscle that was my right shoulder, not as bad as it had been immediately after the accident, but healing could only bring back so much.

I would never fight again, even if I had wanted to. Learning to use my arm once it was healed was going to be an effort enough.

Turning the mirror left-handed, avoiding overusing my shoulder, I stared at my reflection in it. Lieu had kept me alive so far, cared for me, cared about me. But I was dead weight. Sooner or later, if he kept trying to slog through the ocean of life, I was going to drag him down to drown. Or, even worse, they would find us. He only had one clearly recognisable feature and that was his moustache—but there had only been one body at the beach. They probably assumed I had survived.

Lowering the mirror, I sighed and looked back up at the ceiling. There had to be something I could do to prove to Lieu that I wasn't just waiting for the right time and the right amount of healing to strike. That saving me was worthwhile. That I was better than the man that I had turned out to be. That he could trust me.

I looked back down to the mirror, lifted it up, shifted on the pillow, and folded my legs to prop it against my thighs, giving me a clear enough view of my own head. There was something I could do. Something I would have done years ago, if it wasn't for the better uses I had found for it.

Shifting, I reached and stretched my left arm around until I could cup the back of my own neck, fingers fitting into positions I had used on dozens of others, pressing against my spine and holding it tight, my breath somewhat constricted, the Chi in my body slowing. I hesitated, raised my right arm.

The whole set up behind my ability to remove Bending was simple—Chi flowed in some ways with the blood. Where there wasn't a clear bloodflow, there could be no Chi. That was how it worked in battle for short periods of time—a strong enough hit to a pressure point redirected the blood and the chi just long enough from that location that it was cut off. That cutoff, like a limp put to sleep, lasted a certain amount of time—stronger or weaker with the pressure points hit. The same principle, but to a much greater scale, was how the blocking worked.

First, pressure to two of the weakest points in the body—the base of the skull and the centre of the forehead. That began to block it, as it would have if you hit hard enough, although a hard enough hit to either of those would do much more lasting damage. And then, with Bloodbending, I was able to reroute the Chi away. Permanently. Just like what probably would have happened if you hit either spot hard enough, only without killing. It was a simple matter of closing off direct bloodflow to those two particular points directly and moving it elsewhere, allowing everything to still continue functioning correctly through shortcuts, while still giving those two locations the blood they needed to survive, but cut off from the Chi pathways.

It had taken me years of practice, and a few very serious mistakes that had ended in things a lot worse than loss of Bending to get it right. It was a careful process, which was why I had never tried it on myself. If I slipped up, any number of things could go wrong. I could blind or mute myself. I could paralyse myself, or send myself unconscious and never wake up.

Or I could kill myself. It had happened before.

But it was either that or live the rest of my life knowing that Lieu had given up everything he had to save me, the thing he despised most in the world. His sister had been killed by Benders and I understood now why he detested them—they had attacked and murdered one of their own, for sport, for money. And I could understand why he had wanted revenge and equality so much. The only thing I couldn't understand was why he had saved me, and for what reason.

My Bending might have saved his life, but it had also nearly ended it.

Staring at my shaking hand in the reflection of the mirror, I turned it around, felt my face grimace at the twist and twinge in my shoulder, and brought it toward my face. Looked into my own eyes in the mirror, and then pressed my thumb against the spot between my eyebrows, and closed my eyes.

For a moment I felt everything inside me. The shift of my organs and the pump of my blood in my veins, the pulsing of every minute inch of me. The creak of bones and the stretch of muscle. Then I let out a slow breath, and cut the bloodflow.

It was a darkness so complete and so utter that I could not even begin to comprehend the edges of it. It took me, and for a long time, I knew no more.

 

There was no morality in the darkness. No lies, and no secrets. Only silence. And I wandered there, deep beyond the edges of the world, until something tugged me back.

 

There was warmth wrapped around my hand, holding my fingers tight. Fingers, slanting over mine. A voice, whispering my name, over and over again. And everything felt heavy. Alternating, a weight beside me. I don't know how much time passed or even if time did pass, but finally there was a light burning against my eyelids and I opened them.

It was daytime. The windows and doors were open to let in fresh air, and there was a heavy weight on the bed next to me. I took in a slow, shaky, breath, and tried to turn my head. Twice I failed at it, and finally I managed to look over.

Lieu was asleep, sitting on his bedroll on the floor, slumped against the side of my bed, his dark head of hair stark against the white sheets, holding my hand limply in his own. There were circles under his eyes like he hadn't slept in days. I tried to clench my hand, tried to move it, to lift it to touch his hair.

All I got was a very slight twitch in my fingers. Shaking, I tried again, willing my muscles to move to twist to clench to shift and instead I got…a very slight curl of my fingers, sliding on Lieu's skin. Turning again to look downward, I willed the same thing in my legs, and I saw one toe twitch under the blankets. Eyes searching, I turned toward the pitcher on the table and exerted my full strength of will and curled three fingers, pulling it toward me.

A small handful of water splashed over the edge.

I could feel my blood in my veins, and Lieu's, the slow, even beat of his heart. I had failed. I hadn't cut off my Bending—I had cut off my brain from my body instead. Terror started to rise thick in the back of my throat as I desperately tried to jerk something, anything, to move my body, and it responded sluggishly, like I was heavily sedated all over, and in a fit of fear I managed to jerk my leg without any real direction and it moved—it moved I wasn't paralysed—and I kneed Lieu hard in the side of the head. He awoke with a shout of surprise, jerking forward from the smack, righting himself a moment later and turning toward me.

I was gasping for breath, and he held my gaze, his eyes riled with emotions, and shifted forward, sitting up and pulling himself up to sit on the edge of the bed. "You're awake," he whispered, voice hoarse and quiet. "I was afraid you wouldn't—"

"What…" it was an effort of will to move my mouth, the muscles not responding, although more with lack of use than inability. I swiped my tongue around the inside of my mouth, on the underside of my lips, and tried again, my jaw creaking as it started to work again—how long had I been out? "What happened?"

"I was hoping you could tell me." Lieu's eyebrows were pulled low, worry etched on his face. Worry, and suspicion. "When I got home you were unconscious—that was four days ago. I was afraid that…" he didn't finish it, but I knew what he had been about to say. That you wouldn't wake up. "Can you move?"

I managed to jerk my legs again, and this time, both moved. Nothing fine motor. But this was a start. A silence fell between us then, and after a moment, Lieu let go of my hand.

"The city?" I asked, the words coming slowly to my lips. Lieu folded his hands between his legs and stared at the wall.

"I got everything. Well, all that we needed there. Our savings, and cloth to make new clothes with, the tailor in town nearby can make them now that we have fabric. I caught up with the news, and a few other things as well."

"News?"

"The Avatar's been and gone from the South Pole. She got her Bending back and has been coming in and out of the city fixing all that we did—except," Lieu paused and glanced to me. "Not the Triad members. She refuses to give their Bending back. So I guess we did the right thing there after all." I couldn't bring myself to smile, not even the slightest. Being right didn't even really seem to matter anymore. "Chi Blocking has been declared illegal for a period of a year within city limits, and all Equalists are hidden underground—there are radio signals going out and around, most of them keeping tabs on everyone, they're disbanding underground. You and Tarrlok have been declared dead, and there's a hell of a price on my head."

"Glad you made it back."

"Me too." Lieu sighed and looked back to me. I continued to try to curl the fingers of one hand. "Amon…" he trailed off, done speaking of other things, and I knew what was about to come. He had seen every incarnation of my failures through the years. The reaction to what a little bit of misdirected blood around the brain could do. "You tried to—"

"It's a curse," I whispered. "I hurt you with it. I thought you would…" it was like waking up from being burned all over again, only it was my body moving sluggishly even when healed, my brain working faster than my muscles could. "I would be better without it."

"No," Lieu said quietly, and then tugged away, stood up, walked to the table, and leaned against it. I could see his shoulders, tight with emotion, and one fist curl and clench. "No, Amon, that's not it." He lifted his other hand, ran it through his hair, and turned around. "Did it ever occur to you that I wouldn't care one way or another what you were—a Bloodbender, Yakone's son, the Avatar, actually a woman, anything. Amon, I love you, as weird as that is for you to comprehend. I love all of you—Bending included." He looked me in the eye. "I was thinking about it, on the way back from Republic City. If it hadn't been for Waterbending, the healer who patched you up, for you and as much as I hate to say it, even your Bloodbending…we wouldn't be alive right now." I didn't say it, but I wanted to—if it wasn't for my Bloodbending, he never would have been injured in the first place.

"Amon, there are people that need to have it taken away—people that abuse it. Triad leaders, your brother. But people like that little old woman healer, she wasn't hurting anybody. Neither were those police officers, or the Order of the White Lotus." Lieu looked down at his hands. "We might have been in the wrong by taking it away from everyone. I don't love you any less than I did when you weren't a Bender. I'm angrier with you, but that has nothing to do with Bending. That has to do with you lying to me."

"But you hate Benders," I whispered, and Lieu sighed.

"I used to. Not anymore. Now I hate the class divide, how we're overlooked in society because we're deemed unskilled. And compared to Benders in a lot of ways…we are. I can't heal. I can't power generators, or capture criminals with wires. We are weaker. But that doesn't mean that we should be treated badly, or that we should be seen as a burden on society. We have our own skills, just as good or even better than the Benders do, and we shouldn't be slighted because of that. Our talents need to be accepted and embraced as much as anybody else's." He rubbed at his chin—he needed a shave, I noticed. "Now I see that we were wrong, Amon. Cutting off everyone from their Bending doesn't fix it. The way to fix it is to redefine our society. We were the wrong two people to change the world, you and me.

"Especially since…we saw what happened to the people that didn't have their Bending. As much as I know you as a man without it, I see now that if you didn't have your Bending anymore…" Lieu looked at me, with quiet blue eyes.

"You wouldn't be the man I fell in love with without it. I don't want you to get rid of it. Prove me wrong, Amon. Show me that just because you are a Bender you won't abuse it the way that you did once." He approached and sat down on the edge of the bed, reached out and took my hands in his, squeezed them. "I love you. All of you. Even the parts that lied to me, that reacted and tried to kill me. And I want to keep loving them." He leaned forward, pressed his forehead against mine. "I've had four days to think about it. When I got home and found you laying there, unmoving, barely breathing—I was so scared. I thought I had lost you."

"I'm sorry," I whispered, my voice cracking, trying to squeeze his hands back, and closed my eyes to listen to his breath. "I only meant to make you happy."

"Just looking at you makes me happy. Don't ever do something this stupid again—you could have paralysed yourself, killed yourself. Did you think about if I would want that?"

"No." My voice and throat felt wet. Lieu leaned forward, pulled me close, wrapped me in his arms, and pulled me upward until we were hugging, and pressed his palms over my shoulderblades, and I shakily managed to get one hand to curl against his shoulder muscles, my other hand curled against his chest. "I didn't."

"Just stay with me." Lieu whispered.

"Always." I promised, and in that moment, I knew I meant it. Always. He had given his life for me—and now as I had said, I had to give my life for him.

And I would.


	7. Chapter Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s a lot to a relationship. There’s a give and a take, a pull and a push. And sometimes, just when you think you’ve lost it all, a little bit can go a long way.
> 
> The Lieutenant finds Amon half-dead after Tarrlok explodes their boat, and nurses him back to health. They’re a long way from what they were, but that doesn’t really matter, because they’ve started to become something else. Something better.
> 
> It’s a hard road, and they’ve got a long way to walk—but wherever they go, they’re going together.

_The one downside to this is that we can't go to healers anymore,_ Amon said, tossing off his muffler and helping me to sit down on our bed, expression closed off, and I groaned through my grit teeth in pain. _How did you manage to fall off the building anyway?_

 

 _He pushed me while you were down,_ I grunted, grimacing as he straightened my broken leg out on the bed, careful hands making it lay flat. Amon quickly unbuttoned his coat and shrugged it off, set it aside on the foot of the bed, knocked back the hood of the undershirt he wore, and helped me get my boots off, and then carefully helped me out of my pants. Breathing through my teeth, I leaned back against the headboard and stared at the ceiling and tried not to think. His footsteps were quiet, muffled on the carpet, as he returned to the bed with the solid wood we used for splints (a preemptive buy, yes, but it would probably come in handy plenty before things were done) and grabbed my ankle.

 

_Can you get it any straighter?_

 

 _Yeah, hold on._ I groaned and grabbed my knee and pressed it more onto the bed, biting my lip and clenching my jaw until my lip bled and my teeth ground loudly together. But I had to. Amon reached out with steady hands and made sure my leg was straighter, and then he said a quiet,

 

 _This is going to hurt,_ and then he snapped my awkwardly bent broken bone back into place.

 

I screamed until someone banged on the floor above us and Amon put his hand over my mouth, leaned forward, and took my hand. I squeezed his fingers back until he made a quiet noise of pain and I finally began to calm down, shaking, tears in my eyes. Gasping for breath, he let my mouth go, cupped my cheek in one hand, and watched me with his eyes, clear in the light from the moon through the half-closed shutters.

 

 _That hurt more than breaking it in the first place did._ My voice came out half an octave higher than I was used to, and sounded oddly strained.

 

 _I'm going to get a lamp and bandage you up._ Standing, moving away, I clenched my jaw and watched the wall while his footsteps moved around the room, and then when he came back and sat down on the bed, I closed my eyes. He worked quietly and quickly, being careful not to budge my newly-straightened leg, and soon enough I hissed as he wrapped the splint tight around my shin and finished bandaging it up to keep my leg still. _No more Triad fights for a while, I think._ I nodded blindly and turned into his hand when he ran his fingers through my hair. _Let me get you some willow bark tea and then you should sleep._

 

I kissed the bottom of his palm. Later, in the coming days and weeks, he helped me figure out how to get around on a broken leg. How to make sure it healed. We figured it out together, and I returned the same favour of being a crutch plenty of times over the years. First aid was one of those things we picked up early. We would use it plenty of times, for scratches, for lightning, for gushing abdomen wounds. A broken leg would turn out, by the end of our revolution, to be the least of my worries.

 

—— Chapter Six : ——

_to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature:_

_to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image,_

_and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure._

_[ Hamlet, Act III, Scene ii ]_

 

It had been like starting all over again. Even though Amon had tried to stay awake—explaining it as he had slept too long and too much, he never wanted to sleep again—he was back out again within half an hour of waking up. Deeply asleep, but not unconscious like he had been. I took the time to change his bandages and eat, watching him while he slept, fingers still curled like they were holding onto me.  Eventually I went and finished setting up the things for when he woke up. He slept for over a day, but when he woke up again, eyes clear and watching me, I knew, deep in my heart, that this was the last time the darkness would take him like that. He was right—he _had_ slept too much.

 

It had been two months, and he gave me the look of someone determined, no matter what, to get himself back to humanity. And, after twenty years, if I knew anything about Amon, it was this—there was probably nobody as stubborn as he was when he put his mind to it. There was a reason he had built a revolution from the ground up, and it had a hell of a lot to do with determination, an obsessive work ethic, and his refusal to give up.

 

"What did you get in the city," he asked me after I had helped him eat and drink and he was once again flat on his back, curling and uncurling the fingers of his left hand, trying to figure out how to use the muscles again.

 

"Not all that much there." I leaned on the back of the kitchen table chair, arms folded over it. "Some cloth, a few changes of clothes for me, and a tape measure—there's a tailor in town and I'm going to get him to make you some new clothes. Something that will cover all your burns well enough, while still being light enough to wear outside in the summer. A few pairs of shoes—they're sandals, your size, don't worry—and a few other things. In town I picked up a bunch of building material and an actual plough. Soon enough I'm going to start rebuilding this place. It's a mess. Once it's built we can get some furniture too. I got seeds and a rake and some other things to plant with—we won't have a big harvest this year since most of the fields are still fallow and full of rocks, but we'll have enough to get through the winter and sell the rest for some profit. I got a second ostritchhorse and a few goosehens—I'm keeping them in a makeshift coop until I can finish rebuilding the old one."

 

"You always were good with your hands." His mangled lips flashed, momentarily, into a smile. I found myself smiling back.

 

"But I did get you something else. Let me get your new measurements to give to the tailor and then I'll show you."

 

"I've lost a good bit of muscle mass and some weight—I'm probably a lot skinnier than I used to be." I went to the bags from the city and pulled out the tape measure, a lead pencil, and a pad of paper to come back over to the bed, and he was limp, dead weight as I sat him up, took the basic measurements that would be needed. We had been poor revolutionaries. We knew how to do all this stuff. "The slacks you brought are too loose on me now, and I think this pair used to be tight.."

 

"You've been in a bed for two months, unmoving. Muscle mass tends to vanish when you do that. You're probably lucky you haven't gotten sores on your legs—most likely the bandages helping with that." He slid in my arms, lighter and yet heavier than I was used to. "But we've both lost weight." The strong muscles that had used to be in his thighs were all-but-gone, no longer strong enough to let him jump and flip straight from standing, his arms weren't nearly as hard as they used to be. Especially his right one.

 

"What kind of cloth is it?" Even if his arms only twitched when he put his full concentration into it, he was still able to talk just fine. Which was definitely very good news.

 

"Linen—it's all dark reds and blacks." His favourite colours. I preferred earthy tones, greys and greens and browns. It had shown in the uniforms we had designed. "You'll like it." It took a little bit longer to get the measurements around his legs, and I had to be careful at his head, neck, and chest, but soon enough he was laying back down and I left the stuff on the table.

 

"So, that other thing—is it a surprise present?"

 

"Yes." I smiled at him, and he smiled back. I hadn't needed to get him a gift, but I had wanted to. It was odd, seeing his half-mouth smile, but the fact that he still _could_ was really enough for me. Amon watched me as I went to get the box and pulled over the other kitchen chair to prop it by his bed, and unpacked the box to set what was inside on the chair.

 

It was a brand new radio. There wasn't any electricity in the farmhouse, so I had needed to look pretty hard to find a radio that ran on something else, but here it was. It had to be wound by hand every hour or so, but it would pick up signals from Republic City—news, music, sports. I pulled out the antenna and turned to look at him.

 

When Amon had come to Republic City, he had been a teenager from the North Pole. He'd had almost no idea about what you were supposed to do with technology—as shown by his getting hit by a Satomobile within his first week. After we had been cleaned up by the healer, he had told me he'd been sleeping in an alleyway. No money, nowhere to go.

 

So, I offered him the extra bed in my apartment and he had taken me up on the offer. He'd been fascinated by the electric lighting, the tram to and from work. Once I got hired again, he was amazed by what I could do with engineering. The running water, the telephone and telegraph lines.

 

And, most of all, the radio. I'd had one in my apartment and from day one he'd been amazed by it, spending all his free time listening to it. At first he worked as an apothecary assistant to the woman that had patched us up, but once he'd gotten an innate understanding of the radio (I took the one we had apart a few times to show him how it worked) and figured out how to use a microphone, he had gone looking for something else. Very few Equalists knew this, and even less outside of our comrades, but once upon a time in his early twenties Amon had been a radio commentator. He'd done news, deep voice filling the radiowaves, and he'd been in love with the radio since then. More recently he'd gotten pretty hooked on romance serials thanks to some of the younger (female) recruits, but anything and everything was good enough for him.

 

Amon stared back at me, blue eyes wide, mouth part-way open. "You got me…"

 

"You'll have to wind it, but it should be good practice getting to use your arms again." He just kept staring at me, and the radio, and then back at me again. "It should pick up signals from the city even out here, so you can keep up to date with the news, with your romances, the sports…everything."

 

Amon kept watching me, and then he gave me an expression I hadn't seen in years—at a certain point after he had donned the mask and me the goggles, we had started to grow apart. Even then. He had stopped being the young man I had known, and became the stoic, cool leader that had headed a revolution. I became his right hand man, quiet and competent. And our expressions and body language, even with each other and in private, became more subdued.

 

The smile he gave me then was an expression of utter exuberant joy, his eyes bright, lips stretched so wide I was worried about his healing burns, bandages wrinkling, and he stretched out his left hand, arm moving sluggish and jerkily, to curl his fingers around the leg of my pants.

 

"Thank you."

 

"You're welcome," I whispered. I was smiling just as hard right back.

 

 

 

Life settled into a routine. I still slept in the bedroll on the floor, he slept on the bed, and at dawn I would get up and go outside and start building. That first week after he woke up I got his clothes made, and some for myself, and built the goosehencoop. I finished ploughing the other front field and planted the garden as well as both fields, and would water them every morning. At noon he would get up, I would eat lunch and talk to him while he ate breakfast, and then he'd turn on the radio to one station or another. Those first few days it took him three or four tries just to clench his fingers the right way to actually turn it on, and it took him until the fifth day to be able to change the stations away from the news, but it was a start. After lunch, I would build.

 

We passed the time like that. At the end of the second week I had cleared out all the remaining mess from the rooms that were still part-way standing and removed the growth that had reappeared inside the walls, as well as gotten the first of the buds growing in the front garden bed. He was able to talk with his hands again, even if he significantly favoured his left arm, and could turn his head back and forth on the pillow, and ate more than plain noodles and crackers.

 

The third week I had completely rebuilt the pasture area for the ostritchhorses, connected to their already-standing stable, and laid the groundwork for the bedroom that had once been my parents, and now would be ours, as well as updated the outhouse and fixed the roof patch with the summer on the way, wanting to be certain that the shingles would hold in any storms. Amon kept the radio loud enough for me to hear as I worked, and at night we ate dinner together, him feeding himself, propped on the pillows. We rediscovered what it was like to have conversations. I described the outside of the house to him, he talked about the dreams he had, and how moving was coming. By the end of that week he had enough fine motor skill in his hands that he could clench a pencil in his hand, and could jerk his legs even if he couldn't do it so well. 

 

The fourth week and I had the base laid for what had once been my bedroom, what would now be a workroom. The plants were growing well, and the third month was gone. He could easily change the radio channels, and I was finally able to change his bandages only once every two or three days. His burns were as close to healed as they would ever get. No more salve to make them close—now lotion to keep them loose.

 

The fifth week, I lay down to go to sleep, and he stopped me, one hand on my shoulder.

 

"You're hurting your back enough working all day," he said quietly, eyes calm, lips half-pursed, brow lowered. He didn't have eyebrows anymore, but I could see his forehead move under the bandages. "This bed is…"

 

I stared at him, and then sighed.

 

He was right.

 

That was the first night we had shared a bed in three months. We didn't touch, not once that entire night, but I could feel the heat of his body, the way he lay in the bed, pressed against the wall, me at the edge of the mattress.

 

That night, I slept dreamlessly, and when I woke up in the morning, for the first time in months, I felt _right._ More _right_ than I had since Korra had shown up at that rally.

 

 

 

The fourth month came with a heat wave and chirping, angry, loud cicadas. It was finally summer. Outside the plants were growing, plenty of food to keep us stable through the winter, and some to sell as well. The goosehens gave us our first egg, and the ostritchhorses started to respond to their names (I was jokingly calling them after two of our dumber recruits, Rentu and Vaya) and to chirp at me. I finally managed to get the back bedroom built up enough that I had to order a window to set into it.

 

Amon stood up for the first time. Not just teetering it, but actually stood, well enough to take a few steps. He looked at me when I came in for lunch, balanced against the table in the middle of the room, legs shaking with the effort, but there he was.

 

"Show me the farm," he said as I came over to him. "I want to see it."

 

"You shouldn't overwork yourself, you just now—"

 

"No." Amon reached out, clasped my forearm, and took a step closer, leaning heavily on one of my shoulders. "Lieu, I want to see it. You built this place. Show it to me." He was still wearing the now-somewhat-ragged pants we had brought from Republic city and nothing else aside from his bandages, but I helped him to the front door anyway, one arm around his waist to balance him, and for the first time in months, he stepped outside, into the sunlight.

 

He stared out past my shoulder, looking over the fields in front of our house. The plants growing, the stream running. The ostritchhorses, who squawked at me. The goosehens clucking in their pen, and the cicadas screaming. He took his time, looking over it all. Not with the strategist's eyes, but the expression that I had seen on his face those first few weeks living in the city twenty years prior—a child in a whole new world for the first time.

 

That afternoon, making our slow way around, I took Amon between all the fields, pointed out the different areas with different crops growing, introduced him to our small menagerie of animals, showed him the different rooms of the house now slowly being built back up, what would eventually be our bedroom (even if we were just now sharing a bed and still awkwardly at that, I couldn't think of any other way we would sleep—even before we had been lovers we had shared a bedroom. We might not be lovers right now, but he was still my oldest, closest friend. Companion. Comrade. I couldn't begin to think about sleeping without him beside me.) and the large back field, waiting to be ploughed to grow crops.

 

We stopped by the stream after what had to have been almost an hour of slow walking, and he leaned on me, stared down into the water. I could see his eyes staring at his reflection, the bandages sweaty and starting to peel away from his skin.

 

"Do I want to see what I look like," he asked me, voice quiet. I stared down at his reflection as well, and our eyes met.

 

"It could be worse," I told him, honestly. Amon closed his eyes. He had lied for so many years about being permanently scarred, but never thought about what it would be like to truly be that way. "When you're ready." I still had the mask I had picked up out of the water. I kept it folded in with my generator, in one of the kitchen cabinets, and hadn't touched it since we had arrived. Honestly, I was almost afraid to.

 

"I don't know if I ever will be." He was heavy on my shoulder, but his legs supported him. "I suppose I'll have to eventually." I didn't say anything, just stared out over the river, and then looked back over the rice paddy, still laying fallow.

 

"Amon," he looked toward me, and I pointed at it. "Do you think you could get that paddy back to the state that we could grow rice? Otherwise I'd have to re-dam the river and…"

 

"Are you…" he was quiet, "Lieu, do you _want_ me to use my Bending?" I half-shrugged in response. I wasn't entirely certain yet how I felt about his skills, but I could see an opportunity to make our lives easier when it was handed to me, and I wasn't going to ignore that.

 

"It would save us a lot of trouble, and give us enough rice to eat through the winter. If you could make it wet enough, planting would be fairly easy." He was quiet, leaning on me, and then looked at the river, clenching his hand. "We need to divert the river, too. If it storms, it could flood not only the rice paddy but also our other fields as well. I can build a dam, but that would take a lot of work. I'd have to dig a trench and everything." My sister had built the original one, dug a furrow with Earthbending, to keep the river from flooding. That was long since gone. "But you could just do it with your Bending." Amon was a strong enough Bender. I had heard his own descriptions of his skills when he had saved his own life from the boat explosion with his brother, and seen (and experienced) some of his powers firsthand. He might not be able to dig a furrow, but he could easily divert the stream entirely to avoid the floodplain beyond what we would need for the rice paddy.

 

"I…" he turned toward me and nodded. "I could. When I'm more healed. I think I definitely could."

 

We went back to the house, and for the next few days, he just worked on walking around the house, stepping out and coming around to me, brining me water to drink, and he moved slowly. But he wasn't paralysed, just weak. He was getting better.

 

 

 

Five months and Amon could stand and walk. He could easily move on his own, well enough that he had fixed the rice paddy. That evening, eating an early dinner because he was exhausted from that, Amon looked up at me. I had finally finished building up the walls of the bedroom and now I was putting in the floor—it was going a lot faster now that he was using his Waterbending to water our fields. I could spend more time building.

 

"It's the night for my bandages to change." He said it matter-of-factly. I looked up from my noodles, and his grey-blue eyes were watching me from within the bandages on his face.

 

"Yeah?"

 

"I'm ready." Amon didn't have to say for what. I hesitated, looked down at my noodles. "After you eat." His appetite was still fairly small, although he had been hungry when he was healing from his burns. He was still recovering from whatever he had done to himself, although I caught him every once in a while with his hands glowing, pressing them to different joints, and at one point, to his temples, eyes closed. He was getting better at healing, which was probably good. There wasn't a healer in the village, and we were farmers now. We'd probably get ourselves injured plenty. Not as much as we had when we had been revolutionaries, but we were both older now. I couldn't bounce back from a few hits the way I had been able to when I was thirty. He probably couldn't take injuries at all.

 

And, if he was ever comfortable enough, he could make some money healing people. 

 

I ate the rest of my dinner in silence, and when it was done, he took the mirror and set it down on the table and sat still while I unwound the bandages. He had seen most of his burns already—the ones on his hands and arms, his thigh, his ankle—but not the ones where they were worst. His upper right shoulder, which was more than burned, almost his entire deltoid musclewas missing there, making it hard for him to move his right arm, let alone ever fight with it again. And he hadn't seen his face, except the edges of his eyes and his lips.

 

He stared at his hands and ankle and thigh as I did it, and I finished stripping the bandages from around his upper arms, where he couldn't get it. He did his chest and face himself and then he sat there in the chair, naked.

 

I'd seen him like this plenty of times. But, as I took the mirror and stepped back and angled it at him, I wondered what it was like to see it for the first time. Let alone on yourself. Amon's eyes locked onto the mirror, and I watched his expression change.

 

Here was a man that, when I had met him, had been breathtakingly handsome. Now, not so much. The figure that stared back at me out of the chair was almost unrecognisable if I hadn't known who he was.

 

The explosion in the boat had broken him. His right ankle, more shrapnel than anything else, with the spiderweb of burns across the back of the heel. His hands, with lines like cracks in china, thin overhis fingers and palms and wrists. The burns ended there on his left hand, but continued on his right, up over his elbow to his shoulder, and his back. He reached out shaking fingers to touch his right shoulder—where the muscle was gone. Just burned away, ripped out, almost like he was a statue that someone had cracked the marble too hard on and ruined, chiselled away where a muscle should have been. There was little muscle there, and he shifted his arm, watched it tremble to do motions it used to.

 

He had been right handed. He wasn't anymore. He might be able to write with it, but he would never be able to lift anything or use his right arm for hard work again.

 

Amon carefully stood and turned around in front of me, eyes never leaving his reflection, stretching his head to look over his back in the mirror. That was honestly where it was worst—the skin looked like cracked lava or cooling metal when it hadn't been carefully done, cracked and distorted and bubbled, charred utterly black in some places, cauterised completely in others, and it pulled as he shifted, stretching over his musculature, tugging tight. If he had tried to fight in the shape he was in, let alone Chi Block, he probably would have torn them open irreparably. Finally, he stepped closer to me, peered at himself in the mirror, and reached up to press his hands to his face, to feel the damage there.

 

That was what was the most different, out of everything. If not as life-threatening as the burns on his back, it was the disfiguration of his face that had changed him the most. I studied each feature on his face as he learned the new map of his appearance, followed his reactions with my eyes. He started with his ears, the left one mostly intact around the inside, just the back of the shell and the lobe melted and curled in like old metal made too hot, but the inner ridges still solid, and the centre dip was fine. His right ear was worse—totally burned off except for the centre itself, the shell gone. I could remember kissing that ear, nipping at the lobe. I never would again. There was pain in Amon's eyes as he reached to touch the thick hank of hair that was all he had remaining, just about where his hairline had been, a thick stripe of his bangs, and it had grown back pretty well to its old length, hanging down about to his jawline. He touched the spots that had been his sideburns and his eyebrows, stared at the melted, twisted stub of his nose, just the nostril hole with a few strips of stretched skin over it and the bone, his mangled lips, and his eyes sunken deep in black, charred sockets.

 

He stared at himself a moment longer, and then glanced up at me and half-smiled, mouth twisting.

 

"Well, at least my cheekbones look pretty good." I had never said it, but Amon hadn't needed me to to know that it was bad. He had seemed pretty resigned to it, and although there was pain in his eyes over what he had lost, he didn't seem too let down.

 

There were more important things than how you looked, after all. I was just glad he had survived, where his brother had not. "Do you think we need to bandage it all anymore?" I asked him, and he leaned on the table, ran his scarred fingers over his left thigh and his stomach, unburned.

 

"My hands, yes. To keep from abrading the skin and the burns. And probably my upper back for a while, my right shoulder. But not my face. It gets uncomfortable anyway—I can't sweat as well as I used to, and I need to keep myself cooled down. The bandages don't help with that. Where are the clothes?"

 

"Let me get them." I handed him the mirror and he turned it over, set it aside, clearly never going to look into it again, and I went over to the cabinets that were acting as our catch all, bending over to tug out the clothing there. My fingers brushed against the wrapped edge of his mask. I hesitated, grabbed that too, and came back over, handed the clothes to him. He got dressed with the slow movements of someone returning to a routine that they had forgotten completely, pulled on the loose drawstring pants, tightened the hems just below his knees, tugged on the socks, thick black cotton, settled his toes into the split space for them, knotted up the drawstring of the pants. He slid on the shirt, which was plenty loose and soft enough to not bother his skin (with a high collar to cover the burns on his throat) and tucked the top into the waistband of his pants, shrugged on the loose coat, tied the sash to hold it on, and then took ahold of the thick muffler that could act as a hood. He had been wearing one for years, after all.

 

He tugged it up and set it low over his head. Left aside the bracers for his wrists and looked back at me. The thick bottom of the hood covered what his shirt didn't, and I stared back at him. He looked different from how he had before we had come, but at the same time, he looked like himself.

 

He looked like Amon. The man I had lived with for half my life.

 

"The hood doesn't cover my face. The sun shouldn't touch these burns." He reached up to press hesitant fingers against his skin. "Finally need that mask." Amon lowered his hand and sighed, curled his fingers against the top of the chair. "It's gone though. That's for the best, I think. I'm not that person anymore."

 

"Uh, actually…" I hesitated, and he looked back at me. I was holding the mask in my hands, knotted up in the shirt that it was hidden in as it was, and I unwrapped it, and held it out. The porcelain was cool and smooth in my fingers. The paint was all washed away, except for the very faint splotch of washed-out off-white red on the face.

 

Amon took it and held it in his hands like it would bite him, held the gaze of the empty sockets, and his body language changed to something subdued.

 

"Where did you find it?" His voice was very quiet.

 

"It washed onto shore just before you did. I don't really know what made me grab that, either." At the time, I had been in too much pain. I had just acted on instinct, and instinct had said to grab the mask out of the water.

 

Amon turned it over in his hands, ran the tips of his fingers over the contours. It had been his face for so long, what he had hidden behind, until I think both of us had forgotten the man that hid behind it, the man who was the idea. And, hesitantly, he raised it to his face, lifted up the two strings on the sides, and pressed it to his cheeks, knotted it up with the ease of long practice, and looked back toward me.

 

Like he was almost afraid to ask for my approval.

 

"That's the man I know," I didn't even mean to say it and it came out like a whisper between my lips. Amon's eyes smiled back at me from behind the mask, and I reached out, took his hand. He took mine back.

 

He wasn't though, really. Here was a man that was better than the one I had known—less confident, perhaps, but all the stronger for it. Less sure, more scattered, but solider in his footing. He had come through fire and from the edge of death to stand before me now. He had very nearly broken. He had very nearly shattered.

 

But now he was whole, and in the end, that was really what mattered the most. It had taken half a year, but he was back with me. And nobody else could change that. Nobody.


	8. Chapter Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s a lot to a relationship. There’s a give and a take, a pull and a push. And sometimes, just when you think you’ve lost it all, a little bit can go a long way.
> 
> The Lieutenant finds Amon half-dead after Tarrlok explodes their boat, and nurses him back to health. They’re a long way from what they were, but that doesn’t really matter, because they’ve started to become something else. Something better.
> 
> It’s a hard road, and they’ve got a long way to walk—but wherever they go, they’re going together.

_It isn't just us,_ Lieu stepped back in through the apartment door, and I shielded the flame of the candle I was holding from the gust of air. His teeth chattered. _I asked the neighbours—the entire floor is out. Probably the entire building then._

 

 _I can't see any lights out the window either._ I glanced out it again—but there was nothing visible but the reflection of the moon on the snow and the swirling, lashing flakes slamming against the glass. _This is bad, then._

 

 _Ping next door said that this is the worst storm he's ever seen, and he's lived here all his life._ I clenched my teeth against the urge to chatter them. I was from the North Pole. I had seen plenty of storms like this—my bones ached just thinking about the singular one that I had been caught in. _This is three days now._

 

Blizzards rarely hit Republic City even with how far north it was. It was because of the bay—we got ocean winds from the Fire Nation more than inland storms from the northern Earth Kingdom. We had gotten unlucky this time, though. The blizzard had hit suddenly and without warning. The entire city was down. The radio had stopped broadcasting, the telegraph lines were down, the electricity now too. Everybody was snowed in.

 

I heard Lieu's footsteps and felt him move behind me, wrapping his arms around my chest and curling close before I tugged the towel back over the window. It was cold. It reminded me too much of home, and the look on my brother's face as I had stared him down in the snow, and thrown everything I had ever loved away.

 

 _We should go back to bed,_ Lieu told me, and I nodded. We moved back to the bedroom by the light of the candle, and shed our clothes, layer by layer, onto the floor in piles beside the bed, I set the candle on my bedside table, and we climbed in before the cold could seep into our bones. The cheap Republic City apartments weren't exactly built for this kind of weather—they were better suited for the summer months, when at least you could get a nice breeze going. In the winter all that you could do was try desperately to stay warm—and fail. Thus, body heat.

 

Crammed into bed and knotted as tightly with Lieu as I could be, I turned and slid one arm around his chest, pillowed my head on his bony shoulder, and he sighed, tangled our legs tighter.

 

 _It'll get warm again soon,_ he said, like he believed it. _How long do blizzards at the North Pole last?_

 

 _Depends._ I closed my eyes, smelled his skin. _It can be a few hours, or a few days._ I didn't want to think about the North Pole. _There was one when I was five that lasted two weeks._ That one I did remember well—it had been before Bending had broken apart our family. It had been so cold that my parents had finally consented and we had all crammed into bed together, Tarrlok and I pressed between their bodies, my mother sleeping on my father's shoulder, and Yakone telling us stories long into the night. It had come at Midwinter, and it had been dark for a long, long time. Tarrlok probably didn't remember it, he had been too young. I hardly did.

 

Our family had never really managed any memories anywhere near that good. I only wished I could go back in time and find myself sitting in that bed, listening to my father's heartbeat, and tell myself to never show my Bending to my father.

 

He wasn't even my father in my head anymore. Just Yakone.

 

Lieu brought me out of those thoughts with a kiss to my temple, and then to my lips, and I closed my eyes, pressed them away. Those people, that life, was gone. And I would never look back.

 

—— Chapter Seven : ——

_Sir, he may live:_

_I saw him beat the surges under him,_

_And ride upon their backs; he trod the water,_

_Whose enmity he flung aside, and breasted_

_The surge most swoln that met him;_

_And oar'd himself with his good arms in lusty stroke_

_To the shore, that o'er his wave-worn basis bow'd,_

_As stooping to relieve him: I not doubt_

_He came alive to land._

_[ The Tempest, Act II, Scene i ]_

 

Summer. I had forgotten how hot it could get. Born in the North Pole, I had grown up in snow and ice, and although when it got too cold I tended to get kind of tetchy, I wasn't used to the heat. In Republic City we'd always had fans, or at the very least a good breeze, and that had been enough. Once we'd been underground we _had_ gotten central air, and even if it wasn't all that great, it only meant in summer that I would lay around on the floor when nobody was around in just my loose slacks and do my paperwork and speechwriting down there with something cool to drink.

 

However, things had changed since then. The farmhouse did not have the best circulation, and it got stuffy. There also weren't many windows, and even with the door open it didn't make for a good breeze. I couldn't exactly strip down anymore, not with my burns, so I ended up doing the next best thing.

 

I could use my Waterbending without fear now. So, I started making ice around the place and holding it together by strength of concentration. The first time Lieu came in and found me sitting in a frosted-over chair at a frosted-over table drinking icy water, he stared at me like I had grown a second head, then decided _why not_ because he was just as hot.

 

Caring for the farm was surprisingly easy. As the plants started to sprout more Lieu started to teach me about what he remembered from being a child here on this farm—how to grow and tend to crops and a field, and I picked up pointers. I had always been a fast learner. We rose at the same time, early in the morning, and I would work the rice paddy and care for the animals and water the farm plants for the morning while he set up the building for that day and worked on ploughing the large back field, a slow and large job, so that we could grow more food in the late summer and early fall if things went well. We would eat lunch and then keep working in the afternoon, only this time together. There wasn't anything my Waterbending could do for building a house, and with my arm as weak as it was and my loss of motion and muscle mass I couldn't exactly climb up on top of the house like he could, but I could hand him things and hammer nails in left-handed. It only took two weeks of us working together before we had managed to cobble together the back bedroom and another week for him to set up the roof.

 

We were lucky that it never rained in that time. In fact, it was an unusually dry summer. With Lieu working and my still needing to get down fine motor skills, he would stay at the farm all day and I would walk into town, get to know the people there. The older men and women who had lived there their whole lives remembered him from his childhood, and very easily took to me when I used the skills my mother had taught me as a young man—be kind to your neighbours, always be polite to the women, make good deals, help anybody you can—and we were accepted. Even if people did occasionally comment quietly about how strange it was that we lived together and weren't brothers. 

 

I wasn't certain what we were. Friends, maybe. Lovers, not any more. Companions, yes. Partners, certainly. But nothing I could put a name to, and the one time I asked it of the bedroom late at night, Lieu made a noncommittal noise in the back of his throat to the wall and we never brought it up again.

 

We hadn't figured that part of our lives out yet. And as comfortable as we were with each other, I couldn't breach his trust, or put myself too close to him. He seemed to feel the same way. That closeness that we had possessed before, that ability to look one another in the eye, or even just read emotion from body language and hand signals and half an expression, was gone. He had forgiven me, but I still hadn't forgiven myself. There was a wall between us, just as solid as the one he had built to make us a bedroom.

 

It would probably never come down.

 

The night we moved our personal things into the bedroom, I sat on the mattress where I had come back from the dead and looked at my hands. My fingers were still scarred and they always would be, and the weight on my shoulders was different. A mouse scuttled out of the newly-built woodwork and stared at me, sniffed its nose, tilted it's head on the side.

 

I hesitated, raised my arm, and tried to reach for it's blood, to pull, to tug, to make it do my bidding. I clenched my hand as tight as I could. Felt the water surging in its veins, and jerked it like I was making it stand on its hind legs.

 

Nothing happened. The mouse continued sniffing at me, ran over past my feet, and back into the floorboards to burrow out.

 

I still possessed the knowledge and strength of Bending to Bloodbend—but the ability was gone. And for some reason, I didn't think it was Chiblocking that had done that.

 

Something told me it had done that all on its own.

 

 

 

Midsummer day dawned bright and painfully hot. Outside the window a cicada screamed at the top of its lungs and Lieu made a quiet noise into his pillow—a groan of pain.

 

"Shut _up,"_ he grumbled at it. The cicada ignored him and just buzzed louder. We got dressed in companionable silence, and as much as I admired the strong muscles of his shoulders and arms, only made more solid by the time he had spent farming and building, he didn't once look at me. I didn't blame him.

 

Whatever he had been attracted to, any looks or definition or handsomeness I had possessed on top of my twisted soul, was long, long gone. The outside had been made to match the inside. And even as I tried to lighten the weight on my chest, to clear the air, to deal with what I had done and accept my own mistakes, I couldn't fix the outside. I was a broken shell of a man. And I had almost broken him, too. Lieu owed me nothing. He might have still loved me, but it would never be the kind of love we had shared before.

 

Tossing up my hood and going outside with the morning bowl of rice, eating with the bottom of my mask tapped up, I watched while Lieu limbered up, stretching and getting himself awake before he washed his head off under the pump and shook the water out of his hair and looked past me, up at the clouds.

 

Running fingers back through the short black strands and shaking off the water, picking up the cloth that he had laying on the bench by the pump to towel it dry, Lieu straightened and draped it around his neck. It was too hot for him to wear clothes, and his skin, although pale, tanned surprisingly well—probably his Earth Kingdom heritage—and he went around in an undershirt and nothing more. I did not have that luxury. I looked up to follow his gaze then.

 

Sitting at the edge of the horizon over in the direction of the bay was a black band of clouds that stretched all across the sky. Running his hand over his face, he leaned on the pump, and was opening his mouth to say something when—

 

"Lieu Te!" It was a cracking, older voice, and we both turned to look down at the lane. The man hobbling toward us was named Kane, and he was the man that owned the general store in town. "Noa!" I didn't feel comfortable going by it, but Lieu had a point when he pointed out that the name Amon and a mask, even this far out of Republic City, would turn heads. I needed an alias, even if it was just a fairly thin one. He had explained that as the name that he had given to the woman that had healed me, and so we stuck with it. "I'm glad you two are up." I lowered my rice bowl as Kane climbed up the small hill to our house and walked over to Lieu, pointing at the band of clouds in the sky. "An emergency telegraph just came in from the City. Apparently it's a storm, a big one too! Air Temple Island was so badly hit that they had to evacuate and Councilman Tenzin's family hardly made it off safely. Apparently the Avatar went all shiny and caused the seas to calm long enough to make it off." I took a slow breath.

 

Just thinking about her made me want to put my face in my hands and question everything that I was.

 

"Anyway, it's headed right toward us. It should be here around sunset—you'll want to make sure you get everything inside and safe!"

 

"Thanks." Lieu looked down at Kane and smiled. "We'll be sure to. I'm glad you told us."

 

"I'm glad I thought to come by!" Kane laughed, a high cackle. "You two are too far out to get the news easy and it's too early in the morning to have the radio on—figured you would rather know now than later in the afternoon. You two be careful out here today!"

 

"Thank you, Kane." I nodded at him, and he merrily waved his walking stick at both of us.

 

"Well, you have Noa!" He laughed at Lieu. "You two should be nice and dry! Just divert the rain, eh?" My Waterbending had become known by the townspeople, it was hard to hide it when I was watering our fields with it—and now they came to me for healing, since I was the only person in the area with the knowledge and ability. I had fixed up the rheumatism Kane had in one knee just a week or so prior.

 

"Something like that." I smiled at him slightly from behind my mask, but he couldn't see it, and Kane went on his way again, one hand on the small of his back, hobbling back in toward town. Lieu watched his retreating back until he vanished and then turned to look toward me.

 

"I guess we have our work cut out for us."

 

"Good thing the stable has doors and a roof," I replied, and he nodded.

 

"We had better get started. If it's as bad as all that, it's probably a typhoon. It could wipe out our entire fields."

 

"I'll check on the plants and make sure there's a solid enough dam around the fields if you get the animals." Lieu nodded to me, his cool blue eyes hard with resolve, and we finished breakfast quickly and started working.

 

 

 

The morning and afternoon went by in a flash. Lieu cobbled together a better, sturdier roof for the Ostritchhorses and crammed the Goosehens in with them, while I took down to the riverbed. There was no point watering the plants when it was about to pour rain for Spirits knew how long, so instead of wasting my time on that I tugged off my sandals and socks and left them on the riverbank and planted myself about ankle-deep in the stream. I was no Earthbender, but there were plenty of things I could do while improvising.

 

Using my left arm, my right hanging almost-uselessly at my side, I got a good amount of water out of the river and, using it as a whip, lashed out a trench around the rice paddies (because even rice would drown if you got it wet enough) and around the fields, and then I let the water soak into the dirt, tugging it like the waves of the ocean up out of the river and onto the bank until there was a huge muddy section, and I bent the water in that to make a large dam on the side of the river, blocking off both the rice and our own fields—we could easily break it down after the rains left.

 

Using that same method, I blocked off all the sides of the front two fields and the garden and most of one side of the paddy and then curved it around the house as well before getting dressed again. By that time, the sun was getting low in the sky and my stomach was growling and there was aching exhaustion in my bones, but we would be safe.

 

The clouds roiled low and angry in the sky. The rain was visible lashing down out of them all across the landscape as far as the eye could see around the horizon, and it was getting dark. The sun was being eclipsed by them, even as it set.

 

Lieu and I met back up at the house and glanced over one another's handiwork. "Do you think the roof can take it?" We had patched it several times, but it was still weak.

 

"I hope so," he said, looking past my head. "I should really nail over the windows so the wind doesn't break them. Let me go get some wood." I nodded, and he went around the side of the house to the half-built room that was currently our shed/storage area/workspace even if it didn't have a roof, and then I heard him swear.

 

Running was out of my purview, it exhausted me and my legs didn't move nearly well enough, but I walked over quickly and looked around the side of the house. He was holding two slats of wood.

 

"I used the last of our nails reinforcing the stable," he said quietly, and looked up at me. "We need more."

 

"I can ice the wood to the windows—"

 

"If they get broken in, the entire inside of the house will be soaked. Including us. No, I need to go get more." Simultaneously, we both looked toward the clouds.

 

They were getting closer, and fast. The sun at the edge of the horizon was nearly covered by them completely. It was twenty minutes into town and the general store on an ostritchhorse, and I looked back at him. "Lieu, you can't."

 

"Cook dinner. I'll be back before you know it. I can beat those clouds." He shot me a smile, and then started jogging down the hill, strong, powerful legs pumping. I knew him—he could sprint a mile in about five minutes. But if those clouds got closer much faster...

 

He was too far gone already to stop him. I went inside and started to cook. He would get back just fine, I told myself, while I stirred up a bowl of noodles one-handed, my right arm hanging limp and nearly-useless at my side. It took time. Long enough that the clouds had covered the almost-set sun, and I listened as the rain started to patter down, the wind started to blow, and when I heard the first crack of thunder, I jumped and went to the front door and opened it.

 

The force of the blast of wind that hit me almost made the door close again. Reflexively, I threw up my left arm and covered my face, even if I had a mask to do that. The rain was pounding against the ground, and Rentu the ostritchhorse made a loud squawk of fear. Lightning cracked through the sky, illuminating our fields.

 

I couldn't see Lieu anywhere. "Lieu!" I shouted into the storm, and it was whipped back at me and nearly silenced. For a moment I hesitated, glanced back at the inside of the house, and then I stepped out, dragged the door shut, and just in case iced the handle and the catch closed to keep it from opening.

 

I stared up into the sky, the rain pouring down, the ominous clouds completely blacking out the sky. It was dark, and the wind whipped past, and I took a deep breath, and then raised my left hand, and stepped out onto the path from the front door.

 

The rain above me froze, and it was carefully that I crafted myself a water bubble out of it to keep dry. But, the rain wasn't getting any lighter, and after my first step out of the windbreak of the house, the gusting wind almost knocked me aside and it was reflexes and the muscles of my left leg that kept me upright. "Lieu!" I tried again, but there was still no answer. With the rain coming down as hard as it was, I couldn't risk stopping more of it, so I hesitated there.

 

If I left and the house came down, what would we do? If I left and got lost out there in the storm, he would be heartbroken. But he was lost out there, and I was damned if I wasn't going to at least find him to be lost with him. The faster the better—the longer we were both out in this weather the worse it would be in the long run.

 

Walking was one thing. I hadn't yet tried to push my body past that and Bending, with how badly I was burned, also negatively impacting my ability to self-cool with so much of an area to sweat from (my back) totally gone. But this was an emergency. People out in this weather would get killed—and at that moment, _people_ also included the love of my life.

 

I started running.

 

 

 

"Lieu!" My voice didn't carry far in the force of the storm as it blew me down the path in front of the house, but at the very least I was dry. "Lieu!" It was like I was seven again, and Tarrlok had lost his pet starfishotter and I was calling for it on the tundra while he sat inside and cried with our mother. "Lieu, where are you?" The storm whipped harder in response, the wind howling, the trees of the forest creaking next to me as I dug my heels into the path to keep from being totally blown over. If I lost my footing here I would probably never get it back.

 

Walking to the edge of the path and ducking into the trees to use them as a windbreak, I kept moving as fast as I could, my sandals catching in the undergrowth. "Lieu!" Still nothing but the moaning wind in response. "Lieu!" A twig snapped beneath my foot and I paused, closed my eyes, and listened.

 

This wasn't working.

 

Flattening against one of the trees, the damp bark digging into the remains of what had once been my back, I crossed my arms over my chest. I was dry, but I needed to find Lieu—he wouldn't be dry. I needed an alternative to blindly running around and shouting for him.

 

So I exhaled a slow breath and extended my senses. I might not be able to Bend blood anymore, but there was still water in blood—I could still sense it. If he had come into the forest for shelter too, he would probably be close enough that I could sense him. At first all I felt was the forms of animals in the undergrowth, then larger ones hiding, and then finally—there. I was no Earthbender with a seismic sense, but I could feel the figure that I knew well enough, and I opened my eyes, started moving again toward him between the trees, keeping my water barrier up one-handed, calling his name until I finally heard him shout in response and I hurried my steps.

 

He was about fifty feet into the forest, huddled beneath a tree. As soon as I was close enough to him I tossed out the edge of my bubble to hold him too, and then with my right hand, I tugged all the water from his clothes and hair and tossed it aside onto the ground.

 

He looked up at me, blue eyes pale and the colour of the sky just before dawn, shaking still from being cold and wet, and took a few steps closer. It was humid and warm in spite of the howling wind and lashing rain, but that didn't change anything about what being sopping wet did to you. He grinned at me awkwardly and held up a hand.

 

He had a bunch of nails.

 

"Well, at least I got them."

 

"Who's the idiot now," I said, moving closer and checking him over. He had no serious injuries as far as I could tell, as far as getting blown over or hurt by the typhoon went, he just looked wet and scared and annoyed. "You could have gotten killed or lost out here."

 

"Lucky for me I had you to come find me, huh." I hesitated and then hugged him, and he was warm in my arms. Still slightly damp even though he wasn't soaking anymore, and he hugged me back one-armed. It was the most intimate contact we'd really had as I pressed my face into his shoulder, breathed in the smell of his skin mixed with the scent of the rain, and pulled back a moment later before either of us started thinking about it. It was still pouring, and still howling with wind.

 

"We need to get back and nail up those windows."

 

"Yeah, we do." 

 

"Stay close to me—I don't know how much wider I can make this bubble." The rain was really pounding down, and the wind was making it very hard to protect us. I was no Airbender, able to stop the winds. I could just calm the rains in a small area. Lieu nodded and he took a spot behind my right shoulder, somewhere I was plenty used to him being, and we fought our way back into the wind toward the farm.

 

It was significantly harder than it had been when I had been walking in the same direction as the wind—now the gusts were against us, and more than once it was only Lieu's uncanny ability to pretend to be a solid wall that kept us both from flying over, because every time the wind threatened to rip me off my feet and break down the bubble I would lose half my concentration and my footing, but he had one strong arm and a strong chest to keep me upright.

 

Together we battled our way back to the farmhouse, and laboured up the hill. The plants were being lashed by the rain, and the ostritchhorses were still crying into the storm, although their stable stood solid. The door was still closed thanks to my icing of it, and I renewed the freeze after a moment before I followed Lieu, keeping the dry bubble around him as he gathered the slats of wood, me drying them and the walls of our house, to nail them up around all the windows.

 

"Is this why the door opens outward?" I asked Lieu as we came back inside, me melting and pulling free the iced doorknob to let us in, tossing the rest of the water out behind us.

 

"Typhoon can push it in, and rip up the inside and blow off the roof." Using the last of the nails and the last strip of wood, Lieu nailed the door shut, Not fully—but we wouldn't be going out until the worst of the storm abated. We _couldn't._  

 

As if to reinforce that, the sky outside cracked with a fork of lightning, a clap of thunder so loud my ears hurt and I winced, flinching, half-raising my right arm only for the missing muscle to scream in pain and cause me to drop my arm again, and I looked back at Lieu, standing by the door, frozen, watching me.

 

"You aren't….since when are you afraid of thunder?" I wasn't a big fan of it, but I certainly wasn't afraid. At least, that was what I told myself.

 

"I'm not," I replied quietly, moving over to scoop the noodles out of the pot, now rather cool but they had been less important in the long run than Lieu was, into two bowls. I pushed one aside for myself and took the other in my left hand and passed it to Lieu, who leaned against the kitchen counter while I held my bowl in my right hand and ate with my left, pushing up my mask to the top of my head, balancing it on my forehead. "The sound of thunder reminds me of the sound of the boat exploding."

 

He didn't say anything, but out of the corner of my eye I saw him shift, and Lieu slid closer—just enough that he was a reassuring presence at my side, not touching anywhere, but sharing my personal space. It was all I needed. 

 

Sometimes I just needed to be reminded this wasn't all a dream as my life flashed before my eyes, and I drowned beneath the waves that beat like my heart did, the water that I had always felt so close to, killing me for my betrayal and my misuse of its powers.

 

 

 

Later that night, we changed in silence and got into bed. It had been rearranged in the bedroom so that Lieu was next to the wall but still on my right side, like he was used to being, and I was facing outward to the left.

 

Years of night terrors had left me with the innate understanding that I would always need extra space. If I had woken up trapped against the wall, it would only have freaked me out more. If I woke up unable to control my own reactions and I was on the edge of the bed, it wasn't too hard to throw myself off of the mattress and onto the floor until I stopped hyperventilating.

 

It was quiet but for the lashing wind and rain as I rubbed the lotion that kept my burns from cracking or ripping into my hands, and Lieu was laying next to me on the inside of the bed, quiet. I could feel his eyes watching what remained of my face while I flexed my hands and ankles, being sure I got all the inner loops of scar tissue.

 

"You really are a master, aren't you." He said it quite suddenly and I almost jumped, looking over my shoulder. Lieu was propped on one arm, head on his folded elbow, his other hand resting on his stomach, blue eyes watching me.

 

"I guess," I looked away and back to my hands, filling my palms with more lotion and starting on my arms and shoulders, especially careful with the remains of my upper right arm. "Ironic, considering how long I spent avoiding using it."

 

"I don't blame you for not wanting to talk about it." His voice was quiet. "If my parents had been anything like your father, I wouldn't ever want to think about them either. You had your reasons." He smiled at me. "But I have to say—you're quite something. Seeing you do that outside…"

 

"It's how I made it out of the blizzard," I said, looking up toward the rest of the room, still rubbing my shoulder in some half-futile attempt to keep myself from thinking too much about it, and then starting in my neck and back and thigh. "I would have frozen to death if I wasn't a Bender. I stopped all the snow around me and formed it into a shelter. I survived by finding small animals in the snow for a few days…Bending them to me." I had thrown up when I had eaten the first one of many I had killed with Bloodbending, twisting their blood until their necks snapped. But it had been almost a week in that makeshift igloo. I would have died without it. I very nearly did. I was lucky I had come out without frostbite. But, it had been the full moon those few days. My Bloodbending had been at its strongest.

 

And, maybe the moon had been looking out for me—who knew, my mother always said that Yue was a sweet spirit, and spoke of the sixteen year old who had once helped her as a child when she had fallen into the river. I was inclined to believe her after my own experiences.

 

I wonder what my mother was going to think now. Both her sons, as far as she knew…dead. I didn't even know if she was still alive. I had left her alone with my father and my brother. Maybe Tarrlok had protected her. Maybe he had stood up to our father for her. Maybe she was still alive, unharmed by the legacy carried by the man she had married and the sons she had carried.

 

Or, more likely, she had died of a broken heart. Or my father had driven her to her death. I had been given the chance to ask Tarrlok, and I hadn't. And now…now I couldn't ever go find her, even if I had wanted to. Noatak was dead. So was Amon. I was their ghost, living in a fittingly half-dead shell of a body.

 

"I never wanted it." I set my hands down in my lap, put the lotion aside for Lieu to do my back. "A fitting curse that because I never wanted it, I would be the best since Katara. In a few years with practice, I probably will be again." I grimaced. Life did things like that sometimes. The Spirits had a cruel sense of humour—they had taken my lies and made them a reality, and taken my most desperate wish as an adult and done the opposite to me as a child.

 

I picked up the mask from beside me on the pillow and held it in my hands, my thumbs brushing over the cheeks, over the curved sockets for my eyes.

 

"Sometimes I wish I had been him." The mask stared back. But I wasn't him. I wasn't Amon. I was a broken man using the name that I felt most comfortable with. I wasn't the man Lieu had fallen in love with anymore. I was his spectre, still sticking around, trying and failing to be human. No wonder our bed was so cold at night. No wonder I couldn't bring myself to look at him and find him as attractive as I used to, because he could never see me in that way. I still loved every inch and curve of his body, but I couldn't have touched or reached for him if I wanted to—because I was disgusting.

 

I had broken him. And now I was broken myself. Who wanted to put back together a shattered vase when it would only look the worse for it? I had to be honest—I was destroyed. Ravaged. Scarred. Half-human.

 

Letting out a shaking sigh, I dropped the mask to the ground and leaned forward, put my head in my hands, pressed the heels of my palms to my eyes. None of this would ever have happened if I had just told him the truth from the beginning. Or close to the beginning, anyway. We could probably still have been together, and he could have led the Equalists. Maybe we could have made differences through legal means. Maybe I would have never had to use Bloodbending, or betray my own brother, the only blood I had left in the world.

 

Maybe I never would have ended up sitting here, shattered beyond repair.

 

The backs of my eyes hurt with unshed tears but it hurt more to push them out, and I let out a shaking sob into my wrists. The mattress shifted—I couldn't see anything with my hands on my eyes, but I could feel Lieu sitting up, shifting on the pillows, and one hand pressed against the small of my back, and he sat up fully, wrapped his arms around my waist.

 

"I like who you are now better than I ever liked him," Lieu said, leaning forward to whisper it into my skin. "I love you." His lips pressed to the scars over my shoulder, and then to the top of my neck, his arms wrapping around my waist, nose pressing into the joint of my jaw, and that did it.

 

I fell. He was there to catch me.


	9. Chapter Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s a lot to a relationship. There’s a give and a take, a pull and a push. And sometimes, just when you think you’ve lost it all, a little bit can go a long way.
> 
> The Lieutenant finds Amon half-dead after Tarrlok explodes their boat, and nurses him back to health. They’re a long way from what they were, but that doesn’t really matter, because they’ve started to become something else. Something better.
> 
> It’s a hard road, and they’ve got a long way to walk—but wherever they go, they’re going together.

_Deep breath,_ I warned and Amon nodded, his grey-blue eyes wide and more alight than I had ever seen them, curling his fingers into my shoulders and biting his lip as I slid home. His feet jerked and pressed against the skin at the small of my back, his breath caught in his lungs as I settled, deep inside him, balls pressed against the crack of his ass. His breath was short and sharp in his chest, his fingers digging into my skin hard enough that I could feel a few pinpricks of blood, and I pressed a kiss to the joint of his jaw. _Breathe._

 

He sobbed into my hair, and I kissed his skin again, just behind his ear, running reassuring hands over his waist. We had taken plenty of time with preparation, but it still hurt. I knew that from my own experience, and he had been tense to begin with—he was tenser now. But I could feel him begin to relax as I roamed my hands over his skin, his body adjusting to the intrusion. _You feel wonderful. You're tight and warm and perfect._ Amon made a quiet noise that sounded like a half-embarrassed laugh and pulled me closer by my shoulders, adjusting, twisting his body so that we were pressed closer together, his half-hard cock pressed against the base of my stomach—it lay neglected, and I shifted one hand to palm his length.

 

The quiet noise that he made in the back of his throat in thanks was enough, and we shifted again, our foreheads pressed together. His eyes were bright in the darkness of our apartment.

 

 _You're so perfect,_ Amon whispered into the air between us, superheated, his fingers sliding up the back of my neck to tangle in the hair there, and he smiled. It was small, and sweet. _I'm so happy._

 

 _Me too._ It seemed like this had been building between us from day one. I should have noticed earlier the way that he looked at me, the light in his eyes. The pain in his expression when I brought home women (and the first time I brought home a man, the half-hidden shot of triumph). But I hadn't before now. Or, maybe it was for the best that it had taken us until now. We fit perfectly, better than anybody else had ever aligned to me, and even before we were starting to rock together, there was just enough of a starting spark to make us both ache.

 

We made love slow and sweet there in the moonlight through the shutters, Amon moaning softly, me whispering quiet praise into his hair as I took him on the sheets, his body arching to meet me and his hips shifting to rock back into mine. It was quiet but not silent, and there was no wasted breath, no wasted praise, and I finished just before him, and stroked him to completion, and we lay wrapped together, knotted in two piles of skin and touch and desire, sated.

 

Amon smiled into my hair, a giddy grin, and I smiled into the side of his neck, my eyes half-closed, and breathed the scent of him. He held me in the afterglow like I was the most precious thing in the world, and I knew it then.

 

I would never be with anybody else as long as I lived. Nobody could ever be anything near enough for me—not after him.

 

—— Chapter Eight : ——

_As from my soul which in thy breast doth lie:_

_That is my home of love: if I have ranged,_

_Like him that travels, I return again;_

_[ Sonnet 109 ]_

 

I watched Amon, sitting there on the edge of the bed, his face in his hands, and hesitated. There was too much trapped between us, it had felt like—too many lies and half truths and scars and tangled emotions forming this giant, unbreakable wall. He seemed even more scared of pulling it down than I was, and I hadn't wanted to touch it.

 

Amon was a shattered man. In body, yes, but not in spirit, even if he didn't see it himself. In spirit he was stronger than ever, broken down and built back up again, indestructible, undefeatable. And, over the years that he had worn that mask, I had learned to accept the face there like there _wasn't_ one beneath it. And now that there wasn't one there… that didn't change a thing. At least for me. For him, it did. He was missing so much of himself.

 

When he sobbed into his hands, though, I knew I couldn't wait any longer. Sitting up carefully, I reached out and set one hand against the small of his back, my fingers curling around the top of one hipbone, and I leaned closer, moving the lotion to set it aside on the bedside table, and I wrapped my arms tight around his waist, leaned forward, and pressed my face against his skin. What was left of it, anyway. "I like who you are now better than I ever liked him," I whispered it against his shoulder—and without thinking, I knew it to be true. "I love you."

 

I kissed the top of his collarbone, and, shifting, did the same to the top vertebrae at the back of his neck, where his hairline had used to end, and leaned around to press my nose against the joint of his jaw, against where the lobe of his ear had been before.

 

There was a moment where he took a deep, heaving breath, and then he broke down. Sobbing helplessly, even if he wasn't crying, and I turned Amon around, pulled him onto the bed, and cupped the sides of his face, looked into his eyes.

 

They were grey in the middle, like storm clouds roiling in in the summer. On the edge they were the clear, bright blue of the ocean, and at the moment, they were red and wet with unshed tears, sunken into burned sockets. For a moment we stared at each other, and then I pulled him over, pulled him close, and kissed his mangled lips.

 

The noise he made was one of relief, and he leaned into me, let me guide him, pull him back onto the mattress, to press him down into the sheets, his fingers landing almost hesitantly on my shoulders, the muscle at the base of my neck, and we broke apart a moment later. A few tears had slid from the edges of either of his eyes, and even if the salt burned his skin, he didn't say anything, just closed his eyes and leaned into me, pulled me closer.

 

"I missed you so much." His voice cracked in the middle in pain, aching with honesty, and I wrapped my arms around him, pulled him closer, kissed the other side of his neck, his cheek, let him hold to me like I was his singular spar of wood to grip to, to keep him afloat in the storm.

 

"I missed you too." It was probably the truest thing I had ever said, and he opened his eyes, lower lip quivering, and pulled me back down until we were kissing again. It tasted faintly of tears, but more than anything of him, of perfection, of _rightness._ He was important. He always had been. Always would be.

 

And I hadn't been whole without him.

 

 

 

It was slow. Our clothes, shed carefully to the side of the bed, and we didn't need sheets—it was too warm, too humid. It was enough just with the two of us. It wasn't sexual at first. Amon re-learning the planes of my body, slightly different muscle mass from building instead of fighting, the few new scars I had gained since last time, my longer hair, like he wanted to memorise every inch of my skin with his hands. I waited for his go-ahead before I did the same for him.

 

It took longer than it ever had before until he shyly lowered his hands, fingers sliding down my arms to the sheets, and I took his palms against mine, turned his hands over, kissed the backs. The scars that ran like spiderwebs over his knuckles, mottled the backs of his wrists, and turned my attention to his right hand more, kissed at the hollow of his elbow, and then to his right shoulder. The remains of the muscle spasmed slightly as he reached more for me, pulled me closer, left hand sliding down my side to settle at the small of my back just over my spine, feeling the bumps of the bone.

 

"I love you," I said it again, and he made a quiet noise, and then I added, "You're beautiful." The choked sob that was the response was all I needed to hear to know that he understood, and I slid my hands down to touch his chest, feeling the bumps of his ribs beneath his skin, the edges of his scars curling around his chest, the two, raised pebbles of his nipples. I could have touched them, but at the moment I didn't, just continued feeling him. The way that he breathed, slightly different than he had before, the sensation of the burns under the pads of my fingers.

 

And we kissed. Most of all we kissed. Five months apart and all the anger and resentment and regret in the world had built up between us, but we were finally able to step past that. His lips yielded under mine, one hand curled into my skin, the other wrapping around the nape of my neck, fingers sliding between my vertebrae, thumb into the short hair at the back of my neck. It was quiet except for our breathing, Amon's sighs into my mouth, the shift of our bodies on the sheets. It was different, kissing him now. His lips weren't smooth and were mostly missing on one side, so he favoured the other, his head tilted to give the most contact, and his breaths soon turned ragged. The slide of our thighs against one another, his rough with scar tissue, his burned heel sliding up the back of my leg to press into the top of my thigh just below the curve of my ass, and he pulled me closer, whispered my name into my mouth.

 

I had forgotten what he felt like against me. How well we fit—just like we fought, perfectly covering one another's bases, each half of a whole, like two puzzle pieces that had slotted together. Our hips lined up perfectly, his lips at just the right spot that when I kissed him and he tilted his head up our noses didn't bump, our legs far enough different in length that tangling our legs our knees and ankles didn't grind together. And we moved just like that for a while, not looking for pleasure.

 

Just looking for each other, deep in the mire that was our individual emotions and our shared pasts.

 

When at last our lips parted, I kissed the burned remains of his nose and he gave me a look that was all but crying, I kissed the ripped side of his mouth, the hollow under his ear and then both ears and their remains, reached to run my fingers through the last few strands of his hair. It was just as soft as I remembered, and all the more because that was all he had left. Later, perhaps, I would explore his back with lips and hands, but for the moment, eye contact was just as important as skin contact.

 

We were both old enough at this point that arousal didn't come right away, although it came quick enough, but I could tell by the way he gripped me it wasn't desperation, but longing for reassurance that I wouldn't be leaving. That he wouldn't be lost in any storm—the one inside, or the one that raged beyond the walls.

 

"I'm here," I whispered into the crook of his neck as he looped his other leg around my hips, his hands slid up my back (his left one moving faster, pressing harder and closer, and his right one jerkily, coming to a halt lower) and he nodded, turned his face to press against mine.

 

"I know." His voice was broken, but sincere.

 

We came together like that, finally, watching one another, Amon's hands greedily drinking in all the touch that they had been denied for so long, watching my expression, eyes almost unblinking, when I took us in hand together, my palm wrapped around both our lengths, my other hand curled in the sheets to give me leverage. It was the first time in what was probably years that we were silent for any reason other than making sure nobody happened to overhear—he wasn't a loud lover by any means (neither was I) but there was always some noise. Grunts, moans, whispered names.

 

This time we just watched each other. Unblinking. I felt the desire behind my eyes and the want for him thick in my throat as our cocks rubbed alongside one another, two hard lines of arousal grinding together, the need building in every part of my body—we had been apart too long, it felt like. He watched me, fingers digging into my skin with short-cropped nails to keep him from scratching at his burns, and smiled by his eyes, but not with his mouth, because his mouth was busy forming words.

 

"I need you," he whispered. "I'm sorry."

 

"I know."

 

"I love you."

 

"I love you too."

 

We finished fast, a mixture of lack of stamina and emotional response and pure desperation, almost at once, Amon clawing me closer, his face pressed into the side of my neck and he moaned aloud, dragging me nearer with his legs, groaning my name even as I groaned into the top of his shoulder and followed him over, my hand getting jerky on us, stroking until he grunted with oversensitivity, and slowed, our seeds mixed on our stomachs and chests, and my hand slid onto the sheets, and I wiped it dry. Amon remained pressed tight against me with as much of our skin touching as physically possible, both of us sparking in aftershocks.

 

He dry-heaved once, and I choked quietly, closed my eyes, inhaled his skin, wrapped my arms tight around him, pulled him close.

 

"I was so afraid," Amon whispered, brokenly, against my skin. "For so long." I could feel the tears pressing against my hairline, sliding down my neck, and I swallowed around the lump in my throat and pulled him tighter, sobbed once. "You hated everything I was… I only wanted you to love me. I just—" he choked, and the noise he made next was a mixture between a wail and a rattle. "I was such a fool." His words shook, and I shook my head, pulled him closer, bit my lip.

 

My own breath broke as I started to cry, sobbing against his skin.

 

"I don't know what I thought I was doing," I mumbled against his neck, and he pulled me closer, his chest heaving with his breath, every one pained. There was a pang in my heart and I turned my head more, pressed my eyes against the curve of his jaw to drown my tears in his skin. "I was angry that you had lied to me but not… not about anything else. When you were gone, I thought I wouldn't need you." I let out a shuddering breath, and he hiccoughed, taking in a great breath. "I was so wrong. You're all I have. All I need. All I ever needed."

 

"You're more than the love of my life," Amon whispered into my shoulder, his fingers curling more into my skin. "Lieu, I would die for you."

 

"I already did," I said, my voice broke, and so did we.

 

We cried until we fell asleep, and it was the first time in my entire adult life except for the day my family had died that I had done so. But it wasn't painful. It was release.

 

It was a long time coming.

 

 

 

Birdsong, quiet and clear, woke me. There was sunlight streaming through a crack in the shutters, and a warm body wrapped close in my arms. I let out a slow breath. Listened to the creak of trees and the song be joined by two other melodies, to the breathing of the man in my arms, slow and steady—like the waves coming in with the tide.

 

Finally, I opened my eyes.

 

Amon was tangled with me, our heads side-by-side on the pillow, noses just aligned, his muscles loose with sleep. I watched him for a while then, and for the first time, I didn't imagine what his face had used to look like. I just enjoyed the flutter of his eyelids, mottled as they were, without eyelashes. The way his lips were slightly slack with sleep, his slow, even deep breaths through his nose, the way his single shank of hair was knotted. I felt our bodies, tangled more than they had been the night before, one of his arms underneath my waist, the other's fingers curled with mine between us, my other thrown loosely across his hips, fingers against the small of his back. Our legs were the same—thighs alongside one another, knees bent together, our ankles tangled, feet pressed tight.

 

In that single sliver of light across his profile, he looked beautiful. My throat was a bit raw, my eyes a bit sore, but not in a bad way.

 

The air in the room felt so much lighter. Entirely different in every possible way. Everything that been knotted between us into some giant, impossible tangle was gone, just cut away and left to fly away on the wind of the storm—which was itself blown past. There was no rain pounding on our roof, no wind howling outside. Just the birds.

 

For a long time I watched him, as the sunlight started to shift and move over his skin, tucking himself closer to me in his sleep, the top of his head pressed just under my chin, his breath warm against the base of my neck, and I moved my arm to wrap it all the way around his waist, to pull him just a bit closer, closed my eyes.

 

I listened to his heartbeat, steady, and promised to myself that I would never waste another night not wrapped with him, trying to join our bodies into one. After some time, I felt the tell-tale signs of him stirring, the shift of his muscles preparing to wake, the flicker of his eyelids, the half-stifled yawn, before he sighed against my skin and I felt him smile.

 

"Good morning," he said at last, tilting his head to press the remaining side of his lips against the juncture of my neck, and I grinned right back, pulled him closer, and disentangled our hands to run my fingers over the side of his jaw, to push his head back, my thumb ghosting over one cheekbone, stopping beside his eyes.

 

"I don't think I could be more in love with you if I tried," I replied, and he grinned wider, closed his eyes, leaned forward until our foreheads touched, and I closed my eyes too, let our breath mingle, his hand reaching for my face to return the gesture, fingers rubbing over my stubble.

 

"You gorgeous, perfect man." Was all he replied, and if it was at all possible I smiled more, my heart skipping a beat in my chest. "I don't know what I did in this life or a past one to deserve you, but I am glad it happened."

 

"Me too," I confided. "Even if you are a gigantic asshole sometimes."

 

"I'm sorry I reacted that way at the Arena."

 

"I'm sorry I attacked you in the first place." I sighed quietly, rubbed the pads of my fingers back along the curve of his skull to wrap around the base of it. "Neither of us were thinking particularly clearly."

 

"I'm sorry for everything."

 

"Me too." It was quiet between us, because we had said it all before, and we probably would again, until at last Amon rolled away and tugged his fingers reluctantly from my skin and stretched, arching off the sheets, yawning widely, his burns shifting to accommodate the movements, and he lay back down onto the mattress, one hand on his stomach, the other reaching for me to press the tips of our fingers together.

 

He looked up at the window.

 

"That was a fast storm."

 

"It'll slow down once it gets more inland. They always do." I looked over at the shutters—I would pry them open once we got up. Same for the door. We needed to check on our crops and our animals. It was a quiet, companionable silence between us for a while longer, and then—

 

"Lieu?" I turned to look at Amon, and he watched me in return. "Did you… mean what you said last night?"

 

"I meant every word." I reached out, tangled our hands together, our fingers sliding in side by side, palms pressed flat. "What in particular?"

 

"About liking me more than him."

 

"Amon…" I held my breath for a moment, pursed my lips, and shook my head. "No. I… I like knowing you. We kept secrets from one another—" him more than me, "—and that tugged us apart. Now that I know them, now that I know _you,_ I love you even more." He looked at me, unblinking, eyes wet, and smiled, even if it was apologetic, and I pulled him over, until he lay on my shoulder, his palm pressed against my chest, breathing onto my skin. "I didn't even know it was possible."

 

"Never leave me." His words were some of the most sincere that I had ever heard him utter. "I adore all of you."

 

"I never will." I wrapped my arms around him, squeezed him. "I couldn't manage without you anyway." I felt him smile against my skin, and I smiled against the top of his head. 

 

Who said we had to get up right away.


	10. Chapter Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s a lot to a relationship. There’s a give and a take, a pull and a push. And sometimes, just when you think you’ve lost it all, a little bit can go a long way.
> 
> The Lieutenant finds Amon half-dead after Tarrlok explodes their boat, and nurses him back to health. They’re a long way from what they were, but that doesn’t really matter, because they’ve started to become something else. Something better.
> 
> It’s a hard road, and they’ve got a long way to walk—but wherever they go, they’re going together.

The knock at the door was loud and sudden in the silence. Lieu groaned into the pillow and I pressed my face into my hands. It wasn't unheard of for us to get knocks on the door at half-past-awful in the morning, but normally it was a coded knock. This one wasn't. Fumbling on the nightstand until his fingers found the lamp, Lieu turned the flame up to cast yellow glow around the bedroom and rubbed at his eyes one-handed, reluctantly pulling the other from around my waist.

 

 _I'll get it,_ Lieu grunted, sliding out of bed, and I mumbled something unkind about whoever it was at the door and groped around on the bedside table until I found my mask, just starting to catch on. We were getting too big for people to know what I looked like—even Lieu was taking to keeping part of his face covered.

 

Pressing the porcelain to my face and tying the straps behind the back of my head, I fished around on the floor until I found my slippers and shoved my feet into them. Lieu was already leaving the bedroom as the knocks continued, getting progressively louder, and I heard him walk through the kitchen to the door to our apartment, flipping the locks and jerking it open to the end of the chain that held it closed, peering through the crack while I dug up my shirt from the back of the chair it was tossed over, pulled it on. 

 

 _Yeah?_ Lieu's voice was rough and soggy with sleep. _What?_ We didn't have door passwords—not yet, although it was only a matter of time.

 

 _Are you the Lieutenant?_ Said a voice outside the door. I vaguely recognised it, although I was too tired to place it to a face. Lieu didn't say anything in response as I came out of the bedroom to stand in the kitchen, yawning into the back of my hand through the mask. As the silence and his lack of answer continued, the figure outside the door said— _My name is Hiroshi Sato. A Firebender killed my wife. Someone told me that you two could help._

 

Lieu looked to me, his expression half shock, half confusion. _Let him in,_ I said, and he shut the door, moved the chain, and opened it again, stepping back to let one of the most famous men in the world into our kitchen.

 

He looked nothing like he did in the papers—no boisterous grin, jovial smile, round and prosperous. The man that stood before us was broken. He stared at his hands, dejectedly at the ground. His hair was mussed and his clothes wrinkled, his skin sagging. He had lost weight.

 

 _I am Amon,_ I said, my voice rough and lacking its usual coolness—I was too tired. _And that is the Lieutenant._ He watched me, tired and empty. _I heard about your wife's death._

 

 _Benders._ He clenched his fists.

 

 _Yes,_ I felt the lie on my tongue before I said it, _they took my family too._ It was the story that I had told Lieu. It wasn't true. I wished it was. It was less painful than the truth. _Why have you come here?_

 

 _I want to help you stop them._ He stared me in the eye. _I can't stand by and watch them do this to other people, destroy other families. I need to protect my daughter._ It was quiet between the tree of us, and then I flicked the switch by the door of our bedroom that lit up the ceiling light.

 

 _Lieu, put on the kettle._ He raised one eyebrow to me, and I half-shrugged. _Let's talk._

 

—– Chapter Nine : ——

_I'll bear him no more sticks, but follow thee,_

_thou wondrous man_

_[ The Tempest, Act II, Scene ii ]_

 

The typhoon could have done a lot worse damage to our farm, all things considered. Our house and stable were still fully standing, and it had only blasted over some of the taller plants in the lower field, and even then we only completely lost one row. The rice paddy was unharmed for the most part, and the only real disaster was the back field. Four tree trunks had ended up stuck in the middle of the field. Alone we managed to get three of them away, Lieu navigating while I took their weight with Waterbending over the next few weeks, and we got a neighbour to help with the fourth.

 

But it had done good things as well. The way Lieu looked at me was one of those—like I was the most precious thing in the entire world. And the way he held me at night, like if he let me go I would vanish and never come back, that he would lose me.

 

I would never be afraid of thunder again.

 

 

 

Early fall. The mess from the typhoon (at least in our own farming village) had all been cleaned up, but we hadn't gotten the worst of the storm. Along the edge of the bay and even further inland the damage was much, much worse. But we had been lucky—it hadn't hit us as hard as it could have. Life went on much the same as it had before, but with a few differences.

 

At night, Lieu and I lay close together, and we started to rediscover our relationship as lovers, adjusting to fit our new selves, my body so different from what it had been before. We reaped our first harvest and planted our fall crops. We listened to the news together on the radio in the evenings while we ate dinner to keep up with the news—how the Avatar was travelling to clean up after the typhoon, finally starting to figure out what she was supposed to do with her newfound powers, her group of sidekicks going with her.

 

Thankfully, our village had been well enough off in the aftermath that she hadn't come anywhere near us. Which was in and of itself a blessing. Three months after the storm, as the first fall freeze blew off of the bay and Lieu's birthday rolled around, we started to stock up for the winter.

 

And some idiot crashed a car into a tree on the other side of the village.

 

 

 

"We are never planting potatoes again," Lieu said, raking new grooves between our crops. "These roots are ridiculous."

 

"What else should we plant in the fall, then?" Walking behind him with a long line of water from the river, I slowly laid it down over each and every plant, my control getting finer and finer as the months went past. "Flowers?"

 

"Don't radishes grow in the fall?" The potatoes weren't even really sprouted yet, and they were already causing trouble. We reached the end of the row, and Lieu stopped, wiping the sweat from his forehead on the back of his hand while I lay down the water and let it loose, soaking the plants. "Or corn?"

 

"Corn is the summer."

 

"Spinach?"

 

"You grew up on the farm, not me. _Nothing_ grows in the north pole." The one upside to the fall so far was that the cool weather meant that I too stayed cooler, since the summer and my lack of ability to perspire combined together to make me incredibly uncomfortable. Sighing, I looked over at Lieu, his eyes watching the sky. "I'm going to go get something cool to drink. You should eat something."

 

"I'll do the next row and come up after." He adjusted his grip on the rake and stepped over to the next one while I climbed back toward the house, reaching the front door and pulling water free from the pump because I couldn't actually pump it one-handed, concentrating just enough to freeze the edges, my mind fully on that particular action. It was one thing making water into ice or snow or vice versa, but just freezing it enough to be cracking and cold, not solid, was a sight harder.

 

"I don't need a healer!" I jumped, almost lost the water, and spun. Lieu was standing straight up as well—the voice, loud and angry, had come from around the edge of the lane leading up to our house. "I'm fine!"

 

"If you bleed much more you aren't _going_ to need a healer," a calm, quiet, female voice, annoyed.

 

"It's a broken leg," the first voice again. I recognised it—pompous, annoying as hell, with an edge of someone being painfully stuck up, unable to compromise, and stupidly young. "I'll be fine, Korra will get here and then I'll be ready to go." It was the Firebender that the Avatar had been carting around with her during the Revolution.

 

"Bro, Korra's all the way at Ba Sing Se. She won't be here for, like, a _week._ " The voices were getting louder. "This guy sounds like a good healer, I bet you'll be fine." Lieu looked up, his body language getting tight, his knuckles clenched white around the wood. I felt my throat get tight, and I slowly let the water go. "Who are we looking for again?" This voice was the one belonging to the younger brother, the Earthbender, the one that had tried to go toe-to-toe with Lieu, only to get his ass handed to him.

 

"Lieu Te and Noa," the female voice again. This was Asami Sato, Hiroshi's daughter. I had met her before several times in passing, and Lieu had trained her to fight. "The old man said they should be right around here, the last farm on the street, with the rice paddy and the goosehens…" they rounded the bend. I heard Lieu take in a quiet breath, and my heart pounded loud in my ears. "If Noa is the only healer in the area like we were told, then we really are lucky—" almost simultaneously, the three teenagers looked up, and Lieu tightened, ready to spring.

 

The Firebender was one hell of a mess. Broken leg, a bad contusion on his head, his chest bandaged tight in what had to be the remains of his own coat, one arm hanging limp at his side, one eye bloodshot, burns all over what was visible of his neck. He _did_ need a healer. The other two looked a bit shaken and bruised, but nothing more. The younger brother stared up at us, eyes wide and mouth open, and then pointed with the arm he wasn't using to support his older brother directly at Lieu.

 

"Moustache Guy!"

 

"Great," Lieu growled under his breath, clenching his rake harder. Asami stared at him too, missing me, and then said,

 

"Uncle Lieu?"

 

"Asami," his voice cracked slightly, and I could almost feel the twist in his heart in my own, just as the Firebender looked up at me, staring like he couldn't believe what he was looking at. His two friends looked up too, and we all stood there, perfectly still. Nobody said anything for a long time, until finally the Firebender growled and tried to shake free of his brother, one good eye narrowed.

 

"Amon!" I almost flinched at the sound of my own name, but stared him down. "You're alive!" Asami and Bolin, the Earthbender, were finally moving, Bolin stepping in front of his brother (Mako, if I remembered correctly) while Asami slid into a fighting stance. Lieu stepped on the end of the rake and pulled it off, put it in front of him, and moved between them and me.

 

"You aren't going to touch him," Lieu's voice was deep and dangerous. The three teens looked to each other in surprise, and Mako gave Lieu a look of disgust.

 

"He tried to kill you!"

 

"Never said he didn't." Lieu growled, the muscles standing out on his shoulders. "But you won't hurt him. And if you try, I'm going to make you regret it."

 

"Lieu…" his name slid from between my lips, and I shook my head, stepped forward. That appeared to be a mistake, because Bolin jerked one arm up and a huge piece of our front path came to his hand, and Asami reached into her purse and pulled out a glove, designed by her father, the palm sparking.

 

"Hey!" Lieu lowered the rake slightly. "That is _my_ front pathway, you put that back!" Bolin yelped and quickly returned it to where it had belonged, and then smoothed his foot across the ground, flattening it.

 

"Sorry," his expression and voice were sheepish, and Mako growled, trying to swing one handed, but the only fire that came out was a pitiful spark.

 

"Bo, don't listen to them, they're Equalists. You know what they've done—we should arrest them!"

 

"You're not a cop outside of the city limits," Asami said, like she was reminding him for the hundredth time, holding Lieu's gaze. "We knock them out, bring them back to Lin."

 

"And you'll die before you ever reach the city limits." I walked down the rest of the way to where Lieu stood, pressed him aside, watched them from behind my mask. "Asami is right. That much blood lost will kill you. Not to mention that if you don't get those burns cleaned up soon…" I hesitated. He would end up like me. "And that concussion could leave permanent damage if it isn't fixed."

 

"I don't want to be healed by _you,"_ he snapped. "Bloodbender! I would rather die first." I clenched my jaw, took a slow, deep breath.

 

"Fine." My voice came out cool and hard, with the tone I had practiced and used a thousand times before, the detached Equalist leader, and I pushed Lieu aside, slid down into the stance my father had taught me thirty years before, straightened and squared my shoulders, raised my hands. "I'll put you out of your misery, then."

 

"Amon—" Lieu's voice hadn't sounded like that since he had confronted me at the Arena, and I looked toward him, our eyes met. He was looking at me like he didn't know me, anger and betrayal in his gaze, and I tried my best to make my eyes convey one thing and one thing only—

 

_Trust me._

 

We stared at each other for a long moment, and then he relaxed just slightly, like he did trust me, and I looked back to the kids, put my hands into the position that I had used so many times before, my knuckles locked and tight, and then I stared Mako down, held his gaze, and twisted my wrists, pressed forward and pulled back, and concentrated on the blood in his chest. Like I was crushing his heart and his lungs.

 

It was a gamble. I hadn't tried it on any human being, just on a mouse. I hadn't been scared or angry like I was now. This could work perfectly, or it could be a disaster. I could prove I was different or I could stomp on everything that I had rebuilt with Lieu, and kill an innocent teenager as well. Holding my breath, I twisted, turned, and slid my right leg forward, thrust forward my left hand, and _pushed_ as hard as I could.

 

Mako didn't move. I did it again. He still didn't even budge, just stared at me. Everybody did. Even Lieu—like he wasn't certain what he was looking at.

 

"I couldn't take your Bending even if I wanted to," I said, my voice quiet in the extended silence that was surprised staring. "Whatever ability for Bloodbending I had, it's gone. I can't control you—or anyone." I slid back to stand easily, lowered my hands. My shoulders felt awkwardly heavy. "And I can guarantee you this—the only other healer in the area is a day away from here by ostritchhorse. You'll be dead before you ever get there, if just from blood loss alone. If it will make you feel happier, you can have your friends watch me to make sure I don't try to hurt you." The Firebender stared at me, panting, barely managing to stay upright, and then slumped slightly.

 

He knew I was right. As did his brother and Asami. The young woman looked at me and then at Lieu with narrowed eyes, and then grabbed Mako under the shoulder, hauled him upward. "Come on," she snapped. "Let's get you cleaned up before you kill yourself."

 

"Bring him inside and put him on the couch in the main room." As they approached, I heard Lieu whisper to Asami _later_ and I opened the door, let them through, and started tugging water out of the pump by the house. It came to my hand easily, and I let it slide into the bucket, lifted it up left-handed, and stepped inside as well.

 

Lieu and I caught gazes, and he set down the rake and followed, came to the door of the house after me, and shut it. It was dim inside as Asami and Bolin set down the idiot third member of the trio and I dragged the bucket over to the bedside, set it down, and pulled a chair over from the table, gestured away the two teens.

 

"Let me stabilise him and then we can move him into the bedroom." Reaching down to put both my hands into the water, I let it wrap around my hands until I felt the cool, healing ache in my bones and skin, trying and failing to remedy the injuries on my fingers, and then I carefully moved my hands out. Bolin stood at the foot of the couch, fidgeting, looking scared, and Asami—a young woman I had seen grow up step by step into a competent, unafraid adult—looking at me like I was someone she had never seen before in her life. Mako watched me with one bloodshot eye and one clear one, and both spoke of innate terror.

 

Well, it was reassuring to know that I at least inspired that much fear.

 

"I'm going to knock you out," I warned him, raising my hands.

 

"Don't you touch my forehead," Mako said, voice hoarse, and I stared him down from behind my mask—even if the strength of my unimpressed expression was a bit lost by the white porcelain.

 

"Trust me when I say, from my own experience, that you're going to want to be unconscious while I heal you. It's going to be uncomfortable, you will have to sit perfectly still, and you won't enjoy it." He kept staring at me, distrust and anger in his eyes, and I sighed through my nose—half-shook my head. "I'll touch your temples instead, how about that?" The Firebender kept staring at me and then slowly relaxed down into the cushions, and with my hands chilled by the water, I reached out, pressed my thumbs to his temples, closed my eyes.

 

He was a real mess. I diverted the Chi paths, and he was out like a light a moment later, and I opened my eyes, pulled my hands back, and pushed the chair away before I dumped the water off of my palms back into the bucket. "Lieu, could you…?"

 

"Yeah." He stepped forward, avoided looking at Asami, and picked the young man up, being careful to not jar any of his injuries, and moved him into our bedroom, the two teenagers following like his dogged protectors. They were worried for him, that much was clear—but they were also distrustful of both of us. And I didn't blame them. Especially not Asami—we, her father included, had lied to her. Terribly. Lieu laid the Firebender on our bed and I pulled over the bucket of water, adjusted him to sit more easily on the mattress, and started peeling off his clothes, revealing the worst of his injuries, unknotting the makeshift bandage of his coat, pushing it to the side of the bed, and as soon as the pressure was off, calling the water to my hand and shoving apart his shirt, pressing my palms to the skin of his chest.

 

Fortunately, there was no internal bleeding. That I couldn't fix. Not anymore. There were broken ribs, which had to be fixed immediately, and I set to work on stabilising the bone, pulling the Chi paths straight, setting them. Everything became the focus of healing as I continued, sinking deeper into my own thoughts.

 

"What happened to him?" I heard Lieu ask, half paying attention with one ear as I continued, moving next to the burns along his neck and side and arm, knitting skin and broken bone and accelerating the healing. "Did he get into a fight with a platypus bear that was on fire and lose?"

 

"He ran our car into a tree." That was Asami speaking, and I could hear the hesitancy in her voice—she was probably watching me carefully to make sure I didn't do anything to Mako, as well as avoiding looking at Lieu. He had taught her how to fight, been a part of her life since her mother's death, more than I had been. There was so much left unsaid between them. "We've been driving for days trying to catch up to Korra—she took Tenzin's Skybison to aid with the cleanup after the typhoon. I drove all afternoon and was getting tired so he said he'd take over."

 

"Doesn't seem like he did too well." Lieu snorted. "Can he even drive?"

 

"He can, but he's never driven outside the city before. I tried to warn him about the dirt roads, but…" Asami sighed. "He lost control and crashed. He threw us both out just before the engine exploded."

 

"He's lucky he survived," Lieu said finally. "And with nothing worse than what he's got. A lot of that probably won't even scar since you got him here fast enough." The burns would leave a few marks on his arms and shoulder, probably, but nothing worse than that. And even then the scars would most likely heal to just be faint whorls in his skin.

 

Not like mine, permanently raw with no skin to cover them up.

 

"I dragged him out." His brother, Bolin, the Earthbender. "Are you sure he's going to be okay—"

 

"He would get better faster if you three weren't standing there talking and distracting me," it came out significantly sharper than I intended it to, and I could practically _hear_ the boy snap his mouth shut. I opened my eyes and stopped in what I was doing, looked up to Lieu. He looked back at me.

 

We would need to talk when all of this was done, no doubt.

 

"Perhaps you and Asami should talk," I said it more as a suggestion than a question, and they looked at each other, and then he sighed, stepped to the door of the bedroom.

 

"Let me show you around the farm," he said awkwardly, and she looked coldly at him, and then stepped out the door, leaving the Earthbender with me after Lieu followed her out, and I hesitated, puling the bracers from my hands, rolled up the sleeves of my outer shirt and tucked them into the inner sleeves, keeping them from getting in my way.

 

I didn't miss the way that Bolin's eyes followed the burns on my hands up my lower arms, or the way his eyes flickered toward my face, hidden by the mask and my hood.

 

"Help me get the rest of his clothes off," I said, and he hesitated, I glanced sidelong, and then gestured toward my right arm. "I can't lift him." Bolin half opened his mouth to ask me what I was gesturing to, and then slowly came over, his hands raised.

 

"Please don't like steal my Bending or eat me or something," he said, voice trembling and quiet.

 

"Just lift him up," I replied, and he did so.

 

 

 

It was late evening by the time I finished with the healing, and I adjusted my clothes and dragged myself out of the bedroom. It had been a while earlier before that the doors into the house had opened and closed, signalling that Lieu and Asami had returned, and they had dragged out the Earthbender to leave me alone to work on their badly injured friend—which was for the best, really.

 

It was hard to remember that less than a year ago I had almost taken Mako's Firebending in the Arena, my thumb about to press to his forehead before the Avatar had blown me out the window. That just before that, Asami had knocked out Lieu with the moves and weaknesses he had taught her himself. That just about a year before, I had faced Bolin on a stage, and been about to humiliate him in front of hundreds, to stage-fight him, without ever giving him a chance, until he was at my mercy and then to use him as an example.

 

They were just children. I should never have gotten them involved in this war.

 

Stepping through the door and back into the main room, the conversation ceased immediately and all three of them looked toward me, Asami with distrust, Bolin with half-jumpy surprise, and Lieu with affection, hidden behind his eyes.

 

"He's stable." I said it, and they still watched me. "But you shouldn't move him tonight. He needs to eat something solid and have plenty of water and a good night's worth of rest." I hesitated. Since the typhoon we had worked hard on the house and now had a second room, but only bedrolls. "You three can…stay in the other bedroom." There were bowls out on the table, dinner already eaten. Lieu had probably saved some for me for when I was done. "Leave in the morning. I assume you're going back to the city?" Asami and Bolin looked at each other, and then Asami looked back to me.

 

"Uh…that wasn't the plan, but I guess we kind of have to now."

 

"There's a healer about a two day's walk from here. You can stop there to have him looked over."

 

"I'll make sure you have directions in the morning before you go," Lieu said, standing up from the kitchen counter. He glanced at me, and I half-nodded. "I'll move him to the other room and clean up."

 

"Thank you," I said honestly, walking close enough that he could whisper,

 

"There's some for you in the icebox," and I smiled under the mask, our shoulders brushed. His footsteps angled toward the back bedroom—at least most of the blood that the boy had left had gotten on his clothes, and not on our sheets or the bed (not like, at this point, after having me on it healing for months, it wasn't covered in all sorts of things) and it would be an easy mess to clean up. Going to the icebox, I opened it and reached in left-handed to pull out my bowl, picking up some chopsticks from the drawer. It was noodles and vegetables, simple but healthy and good.

 

"I don't trust you," Asami said suddenly, just as I turned. She was watching me with clear, half-narrowed eyes. "Uncle Lieu might, but I don't."

 

"Hey," Bolin looked at her, frowning. "He saved Mako's life!"

 

"Did you conveniently forget the part where he took Korra and half the city's Bending away? Or when he tried to wipe out Airbending? Or when he almost took away your _brother's_ Bending? Or your Bending! And what about my father—"

 

"Well, hey," Bolin half-frowned. "Moustache Guy said that he was okay now, and he seems okay. And he saved Mako's life. That's pretty big."

 

"There are several sins in that list that I…regret." I didn't have much I could say in my own defence, because if I was to be honest—I had done a lot of really honestly terrible things. Things that I deeply regretted, and really didn't ever deserve to be forgiven for. "Asami, if you will allow me, I could perhaps give you some answers?" She watched me, mouth a hard line, and then half-shrugged.

 

"I talked to Uncle Lieu. I might as well talk to you."

 

"Thank you." I hesitated, looked at the bowl—but I couldn't eat in front of them. Not without at the very least lifting my mask, and I didn't want to do that. Coming over, hesitating to sit down at my own table, I finally folded my legs and sank down onto the third, empty cushion, set my bowl on the table, and folded my right hand on my lap. "To begin with, trying to rid the world of Bending was not the angle that we should have gone for." I clenched my fist. "To take it away can irreversibly destroy someone's sense of self. Perhaps it changes those who have lost it to see the problem from the other angle, but that's not what we _need._ " Both of the teens watched me intently, and Lieu, returning from putting Mako in the extra bedroom, had stopped in the doorway to ours.

 

He watched me, too.

 

"Bending isn't the problem. The problem is that people take Bending to be more than it is. Born with or without it, that doesn't change anything about someone's worth or power. And, just like a Non-Bender given Bending would only be out of their element—" I hesitated, half smiled, "Pardon the pun, a Bender without it is also incomplete. I learned that for myself, although I wish I had realised it before. And, even if Bending _were_ out of the equation, people would find something else to make them better than others—skin colour, gender, height. No. The problem here is far beyond the root that people are using to excuse their actions. The problem is that people find themselves better than others on an arbitrary system that has no basis in fact or logic. And I see that now—if I could go back, and have the chance to lead the Equalists again, a non-violent approach would be better. Something to change legislation. Perhaps to work with my brother, to find answers and make life better for everybody. Bender or Non-Bender."

 

"And what about the Airbender kids?" Asami snapped. "They're kids. Using them as bait was just sick."

 

"That was not my decision," I said quietly. It had been Lieu's suggestion, but even he had balked at actually doing it. "Lin Beifong is an amazing woman, and daughter of an even more talented one. Her sacrifice for Councilman Tenzin's family was something even I had not expected. I respect her greatly. When his family was captured, I wanted to keep them as political prisoners to use against the Fire Nation and the Earth Kingdom—unharmed. The decision to use them as bait for the Avatar was made by others, not me. No child should be forced into war like that." I had been too young, Tarrlok had been too young.

 

Children were supposed to have at the very least marginally happy lives. Not to live in fear and terror. Even when it suited my own objectives, using children—innocent of the system perpetuated by their parents, honest and kind, was just wrong. I would never turn into my father.

 

At least, I had tried to tell myself that, and I had turned into him anyway. I had done even worse than Tarrlok. In all my trying to find justice and equality, all that I had ended up doing was hurting people. And, just like my father, in my quest for vengeance, I had hurt those closest to me more than any others. 

 

We really had ended up just like him. And that was what angered me the most.

 

"As for your father," I paused. Was it really my right to tell her something about her father, a conversation he should have had with her from day one? "Has he told you anything?"

 

"I haven't talked to him," was her chill response. "And I don't plan to." There was plenty left unspoken there—something told me they had butted heads. And possibly in a violent way.

 

"We met him just after your mother's death." I might not be Hiroshi Sato, and she might not be my daughter, but I had known her for just as long as Lieu had. "He came to us the next night—he had heard rumours of the Equalist movement growing steadily underground, and he was angry. Scared. He was a broken man, Asami. He loved your mother very much. He wanted revenge, and to help us grow. He donated money, designed for us. Helped plan and acted as an invaluable friend…and ally." Asami was staring at the table, and I could see one hand clench as she listened. "In return, we watched over you, trained you how to fight. Asami, as much as we all did wrong, as much as he might have failed you…all he ever wanted was for you to be happy and safe."

 

It was quiet, and then Asami turned away, pressed the back of one hand against her eyes. Her shoulders shook and she took in a quiet, high breath.

 

"I know." Her voice cracked, and Bolin reached out, set his hand on her wrist across the table, and it got very quiet.

 

After that I cleaned up their bruises, and they went to bed. Lieu sat with me while I ate, and it was quiet.

 

Neither of us could think of anything to say.

 

 

 

The next morning, early, I looked over Mako one last time and Bolin helped him eat, his newly-healed broken bones not moving as well as they would later, and Lieu wrote up directions for Asami and handed them over. Once the teens had eaten, he took them outside, and I stayed in the doorway as he pulled out the ostritchhorse we had taken from the family months before. "This is Rentu," Lieu explained, handing his reigns to Asami. "He's an easy ride and all three of you should fit just fine on him. You can leave him with the family—he was theirs to begin with anyway. Tell them Te and Noa sent you. The old woman, Nan, is a good healer. Give them our best regards." They stood staring at each other. After a moment, though, Asami sighed and stepped forward and hugged him around the waist, just for a brief moment.

 

"I'm sorry," I heard him say into her hair.

 

"Me too," she replied, pulling away. It was quiet after that as Lieu and Bolin managed to get Mako on the ostritchhorse and the other two teens mounted up, Asami in the front, Mako in the middle, Bolin in the back, and Lieu crossed his arms, mine folded behind my back, as Bolin waved once, brightly, and they started down the hill, the Firebender leaning heavily against his brother.

 

"We should tell Korra about this," I heard him say to the two of them, and then Bolin piped up with a—

 

"Hey," and his brother paused. "They saved your life, and they aren't hurting anybody. We should just leave them alone."

 

"Bo's right," Asami said, snappishly. "He might have been a monster, but he saved your life, Mako. Just leave him alone. If we tell Korra they'll be arrested at the very least, imprisoned probably for life. And maybe worse things too. They deserve a little peace."

 

Their voices faded off as they vanished around the bend in the road, and Lieu stood just out of my personal space, a few feet away, and finally turned, sighed, walked the last few steps up to the house, and stopped just in front of me. We stared at each other for a long moment until he took my hands in his, warm palms pressed to mine, and smiled.

 

"You all right?" He stepped a bit closer,between me and the outside world,and moved one hand from mine to nudge up my mask and push it to the side, settling it just along the side of my left cheek, so that my face was visible, before he took my hand again. His blue eyes were quiet, waiting, but he watched me with such intensity—

 

"I'm fine," I squeezed his hands and turned my face, leaned up to kiss him, our lips slotting together. He kissed me back, softly.

 

"Good."

 

He hadn't said anything the night before, but I could tell without him mentioning it—he was happy that whatever it was that had festered inside me, whatever remaining chips of my father that I had been left with my entire life, were gone. It was just him and me, now.

 

And I trusted Asami. Somehow I had a feeling that it would stay that way, just us, for as long as we wanted it to.


	11. Chapter Ten [Final]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s a lot to a relationship. There’s a give and a take, a pull and a push. And sometimes, just when you think you’ve lost it all, a little bit can go a long way.  
> The Lieutenant finds Amon half-dead after Tarrlok explodes their boat, and nurses him back to health. They’re a long way from what they were, but that doesn’t really matter, because they’ve started to become something else. Something better.  
> It’s a hard road, and they’ve got a long way to walk—but wherever they go, they’re going together.

It was quiet except for our breathing, the pale light of the crescent moon sliding through the shades, and Amon was laying on my shoulder, one arm thrown across my waist, breathing heavily, his skin and hair stuck to my chest with sweat. I was panting for breath , my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. Our legs were knotted in the sheets and the room smelled like sweat and sex. We had left a mess all over the bed, and currently, a good bit of it was stuck to my stomach. His legs kept twitching in the aftershocks.

 

Amon sighed, turned his face more into my shoulder, and curled his body around mine, and I could feel him smile. Moving one of my hands, I ran my fingers through his hair, back from his forehead, scratching at his scalp. The quiet noise of contentment he made in return was worth having to move for.

 

The content silence continued until I could feel lethargy sinking at the centre of my bones, and I yawned, moved my hand to run my fingers down his spine, to settle my hand over his hipbone. _We should clean up,_ I finally said, and he half-grunted in response, shifted, curled closer, smiled into my skin more.

 

 _Maybe._ I just snorted at him. Shifting his hand, Amon spread his fingers over my waist, moved it up to place his palm over my heart, feeling the beat of it against my chest, fingers curled in the hair on my chest. The quiet fell again, and I gave up on getting up to clean up. We could do that in the morning. The bed was too comfortable and he was too nice of an armful anyway. 

 

The sound of the breeze through the shutters started to lull me to sleep, mixed with his even, deep breath, and I was half-out when he finally said, _Lieu?_

 

 _Mmm?_ It wasn't exactly a particularly intelligent response, but I was halfway asleep at that point. His fingers continued tracing shapes on my skin, brushing lightly, almost tickling but not quite.

 

 _I've been thinking…_ he started, and then paused. _About the city._

 

 _Yeah?_ Amon was more of a night owl than I was, and he often stayed awake long after I did. When I had asked him once what he did he had replied that he listened to me breathe and thought. He rarely shared those thoughts with me. And when he did, it was usually at times like this—when my mind couldn't really keep up.

 

 _The laws that they just passed about Non-Bender employment._ It had been met with a lot of criticism. Basically, it said that Non-Benders had to be given equal pay to any Bender, and equal benefits, but if there was a Bender that could do the job to more efficacy, they were allowed to be fired without any support, even restitution from their former employer. A lot of people were angry. More would be angrier if laws like that continued. _It's unfair. The entire council is Benders—elected and picked to govern our city by outside forces. Even Tenzin represents hardly anyone, and he's still got the loudest voice on the council._

 

 _I'm too tired to think,_ I mumbled, turning to press my face into his hair. _What are you getting at?_

 

 _Someone should stop it,_ Amon said, and I recognised the finality and the strength in his voice for assurance, for his stubborn decision making. He had decided something, and now he was telling me. _Someone needs to change that. I think it should be us._ I blinked my eyes open and stared at the ceiling, listened to him talk. _It's one thing to talk in bars, but I think we should gather people we know well—start a group. Protest, violently or non-violently. You're an engineer, you could design weapons and uniforms. I can talk, gather followers. If we get enough people prepared to speak out against these unfair measures, we could change things._

 

 _It's a nice idea,_ I said at last, and half-nodded. _Can we talk about it in the morning?_

 

 _Yeah._ He curled closer to me. _Together I'm almost certain we could change this world for the better. Together we could do anything._

 

I found myself smiling stupidly.

 

 _Yeah,_ I said it, staring at the ceiling, my eyes half-open, yawning again. _With you at my side, we probably could._

 

He smiled into my skin, and thus the Equalists were born.

 

—— Chapter Ten : ——

_The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,_

_But in ourselves, that we are underlings._

_[Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene ii ]_

 

The rest of that year passed surprisingly quickly after our meeting with the teenagers, a quieter life than I had ever planned to have, but good just like that. The autumn turned to winter, the cold pervading the walls of our house and making my burns ache, our fall crop harvested and sold and kept for the winter, and we began to prepare for the coming spring and the first plantings. We built the workroom and the sitting room up, a real barn and a henhouse, and before the snows had thawed we had finished the house about as much as it ever would be.

 

Sometimes I never thought that just over to a year before we had been about to take the city on and down.

 

Finally, it rolled back around. All through the winter, even as the first buds began to appear under the snow, I had been working in secret on something for Lieu. He had questioned me about it a few times, and I had refused to tell him what it was, but finally it had come time that I needed to explain it to him. When the first real thaw came and it was warm enough to go outside again, we walked down to the riverbank together with a few blankets and sat in the chill spring weather, bundled up under quilts, me leaning on his shoulder while we shared mugs of hot chocolate.

 

"Hard to believe it's been a year," he said, finally.

 

"Yes." Leaning more against his shoulder, watching the setting sun as it slid down behind the horizon that was, eventually, Republic City and Yue Bay, I closed my eyes. Asami had stayed true to her word—they hadn't appeared to have told anyone about us, and we had been left happily alone. "Although I don't think it really counts as 'a year' until the anniversary of my waking up." Lieu half laughed and wrapped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me closer.

 

Life like this was simple, and quiet, and just enough to keep us entertained and happy. We had kind neighbours and a fine town nearby to sell and buy in, animals to care for, plenty of food, and enough income. And we could live like this. I wanted to—for the rest of our days. 

 

The weight in my pocket was heavy, the weight of the single secret I had been keeping from Lieu for several months. His fingers curled into my arm, and I glanced over at him.

 

He looked older than he had before, back in Republic City as my Lieutenant. There were lines beside and under his eyes that had been so long hidden by goggles, lines by his mouth that weren't caused by battle sneers anymore, but by smiles. There were a few grey strands of hair at his temples. His birthday had come and gone—so had mine.

 

Neither of us were exactly young anymore, and the golden years of our lives were ahead of us.

 

"Lieu," he looked toward me, one dark arching eyebrow raised in question, waiting for me to continue. "I have something for you." We were alone out here, and even if the sun was setting and it was starting to get chillier, the weight in my pocket had been there for too long.

 

I couldn't put it off any more.

 

Shifting away from him and sliding around under the quilt, pushing it down around my lap, he hesitated and then moved as well, turned so that we were facing each other instead of side by side, and followed my movements with intent eyes as I reached down into my pocket. There was a ribbon, plain and black, that pressed against my fingers, and a stone, heavy and cool even with its proximity to my skin. I had picked it up off the riverbed next to our house late one night while he had been asleep—I had used the light of the full moon to pick through rocks with the water pressed away for hours before I came across the stone that I wanted, almost translucently blue, smooth edged, worn down by the surf.

 

It had been more like a stone from the North Pole than it was from here, and when I had touched it the first time, there had been a thrill against my skin like it was magnetically drawn toward me. Perhaps it was just nostalgia, or imagined, but I felt like it had been put there, by someone or something or some spirit, just for me to find. Perhaps it had been the moonlight itself that had led me to pick it up.

 

Curling my fingers around the stone, I drew it out, held it clasped in my palm, and felt the sweat, apprehension, at the insides of my elbows and the dryness of my throat as I hesitated, stared down at my palm, before I looked up at Lieu.

 

He looked like a Fire Nation man, and his mother had been Earth Kingdom, but there had to be a Water Tribesman or woman somewhere in his heritage, to give him eyes like he had, pale blue like the sky at the edge of the horizon. He had never told me where that person was, if he even knew. Probably a grandparent.

 

"How familiar are you with Water Tribe customs," I said, and my voice came out shakier than I had wanted it to. He raised his other eyebrow now.

 

"Only what you've told me, really." Our knees were pressed together, warm under the blanket. "Why?" I let out a quiet sigh and looked to the side, resisted the urge to rub the back of my neck.

 

I had hoped that he would know this, and he probably _did,_ but I couldn't just ask him about it outright. With the way people lived in Republic City, we all mixed, cultures and foods and languages. It was hard to not know at least the surface knowledge about the other nations. But…maybe not. Hesitating, trying to ignore how loudly my heart was pounding in my ears and how tight my throat was, I unfolded my hands around the pendant that I was holding and set it against the white cloth of our quilt. Lieu stared down at it, and slow recognition dawned in his eyes, and he looked up at me.

 

Suddenly, he looked as stunned as I felt.

 

"Is that…" he started, and I nodded, jerkily.

 

"In the Water Tribe, when you find the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, it's customary to carve them an engagement pendant. It's normally for men to women, but—" we were both men. It wasn't entirely unheard of, just looked a bit askance at—normally same-sex couples, at least in the Northern Water Tribe, were seen as something more normally found in those who were not quite of this earth. Very powerful Benders, Healers with close connections to the Spirit World, and those who lived at one with the tundra.

 

I supposed, as a Master Bender, I was probably of that first category.

 

"You aren't of the Tribes. So I…carved one. For you. If you want it." I could feel the blood rushing toward my face, even if I couldn't really show a flush on my skin anymore. My head still felt warm. "If you don't want it I can just…throw it away."

 

Or something. Even as close as we were, even as far as we had come, I wouldn't have blamed him if he ever wanted to leave. To find a wife, to have children, to leave me behind. We were just as deeply in love as we ever had been, and I had promised him _my_ companionship, but he had dedicated his life to me before.

 

Lieu might have told me, entirely truthfully by his own admittance, that he was wrong about not needing me, but that might not stay true. I couldn't help but think to myself, even with his promises and the loving way that he held me, the way he looked at me, his reassurances in the dark of night to never leave me, that he eventually would.

 

I stared down at the pendant in my lap, afraid to look up into his eyes, until he reached out and hesitated, took it from where it sat, turned it between his fingers. I looked up then, and watched his face. His cheeks were flushed slightly, showing strongly against his pale skin, as he continued to look at the pendant, feeling the carvings.

 

I had toyed for a while with carving it with an Equalist symbol, one of the many signs or letters that we had chosen to represent ourselves, but I had realised that doing something like that would only dredge up bad memories for both of us. We had thrown that life away—Amon and Lieu now were different than Amon and Lieu then. We had spread too far apart when I was the Leader and he the Lieutenant. I relied on him to survive, just like—I hoped—he relied on me. A symbiotic relationship. He had dedicated his life to me. Now I did the same for him. In the end, I had picked something simple for the design—a single outer circle just around the edge of the pendant, a single line down the middle dividing it into two equal halves, and across those two halves, the spiritual symbol of the Northern Water Tribe that meant 'counsel' on the left half, and on the right half, the symbol that meant 'king'. They were mirrors of one another, and met in the middle, carved symmetrically, half-spiraling, all smooth, careful lines, like the waves themselves.

 

Lieu ran his thumb over the carving, and turned it over in his palm, looked at the back. It was plain there, like most engagement stones were, and he finally ran the ribbon between his fingers and looked up at me.

 

The smile on his face in that moment was the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen, and I couldn't help but grin helplessly back, even if it was hidden under the mask.

 

It was starting to get chilly outside, the sun finally almost-set, the last few rays of its light pouring over the fields and us, casting everything in a yellow glow. It was the light, shadowing his skin, brightening other parts, that allowed me to see them—there were tears in his eyes.

 

My heart suddenly felt tight, hard in my chest, and my breathing was shallow and fast. Lieu hesitated, reached out, the necklace in one hand, and pulled me close, pressed our foreheads together. He was smiling wider than I had seen him do in months—I was too, smiling enough that it felt like my cheeks were going to break.

 

"I love it." He pressed it back into my hands, squeezed my palm. "I wouldn't want anything more than to spend the rest of my life with you. If you hadn't asked, I would have." Lieu shifted and pulled me close until I was wrapped tight in his arms, pressed his palms to my shoulder blades and his face into the side of my neck. My throat felt tight again, and my eyes hurt.

 

"I'm happy," and it was probably a miracle it didn't come out shaking, or teary. "I've thought about it for weeks. I couldn't image waking up without you. I've never wanted something more." Lieu pulled back, and there were smiles beside his eyes. He curled my fingers around the necklace, and pulled my hands to his neck.

 

"Put it on." I hesitated, but did as he asked, spreading out the ribbon and wrapping it around his neck, shifting to stand behind him to make sure I was tying it right and loose enough to be comfortable, like I had seen my father do for my mother so many times, the few and far between times that he showed lasting, true affection for her. When it was tied, Lieu reached up to hold the stone in his hand, and I hesitated, my hands on his shoulders.

 

"You don't have to wear it all the time if you don't want to," my voice came out quiet, half-muffled against the inside of my mask. It would probably be obvious to everybody who saw it what it meant—and this far out in the country, people did tend to look strangely at people…like us. Lieu laughed, a smoky chuckle, and tilted his head back, grinning, to look at me. His cheekbones were stained red.

 

"Are you kidding me," our eyes caught, and he slid his hands up my arms, and since I was kneeling close enough, he pulled me down, one of his hands wrapping around the back of my neck under my hood, until our foreheads were pressing, "I'm never going to take it off."

 

My heartbeat was loud in my chest, and it was a good thing that we had brought the quilts out here and we lived so far out from the town, because the next moment he was setting aside our mugs and pulling me down onto him and against him and into his arms, and I couldn't have refused—even out here—even if I had wanted to.

 

 

 

It was mid-Spring when there was finally a long enough span of good weather that there came a chance that rolled around for us to take advantage of and travel. We saddled up our other ostritchhorse and set out, me guiding Vaya, Amon sitting behind me, pressed against my back, his arms around my waist. It was almost like we were back in Republic City on my motorbike (since _someone_ didn't have particularly good luck with cars and had always just ridden around on the bike with me, even once the Equalists were big, clinging to my back) except more foul-tempered, smellier, and more prone to making annoyed noises whenever we made her go too fast.

 

We had gathered up a bag of our good home-grown rice and some of our own cornmeal, and those hung from her saddle, as well as a whole bag of some of our own seeds from the last harvest, and a box of carefully wrapped and padded eggs from our goosehens.

 

We set off in the early morning, and were well on our way by noon, me pointing out to Amon all the things along the road back toward Republic City that he had missed the first time we had come back this way, since he had been unconscious and badly injured at the time. He kept his commentary quiet and whispered into my ear, and it was just at the tail-end of sundown when we reached our destination—a fork in the road along the seaside, one path leading deeper into the woods. And as we approached, the trees gave way to farmland, to a stable where two ostritchhorses, one incredibly familiar, squawked at us, a light in the window. A farmhouse where we had been once before, only when we had stopped here, I had been close to death's door, and Amon had been even closer.

 

Stopping at the bottom of the porch and tying up Vaya to the bottom of the railing, I got down and helped Amon (since he couldn't use his right arm to correct his balance or slow his descent) and we climbed the steps together. The last time that we had been here, I had been supporting him, and he had been unconscious.

 

This time, I knocked on the door and waited, one hand on my hip and the other hanging at my side, while he folded his comfortably behind his back. It was quiet inside until footsteps approached and the lock in the door turned and it opened inward.

 

Xian stood there. She looked much the same as the last time that I had seen her, but no longer visibly pregnant, her dark hair plaited down her back, and she stared at us in surprise before her face lit up in a smile "Te!" She exclaimed in surprise. "Noa!"

 

"Surprise," I said, and Amon's masked face was impassive, but I could tell by the way that he stood that he felt almost-comfortable. "We brought some things for you." Xian peered out around us, and smiled.

 

"You can put your horse with ours, bring the things in—I think we can extend dinner to include you two as well."

 

It took a few minutes to settle Vaya down with the other two, although she immediately took to snapping at Rentu, as if asking him where he had been all that time, and Amon brought in the eggs and the seeds while I took the cornmeal and rice, and we handed them all over to a very grateful and happily surprised Xian and Toloak, while Amon found himself getting verbally grilled by Nan, the little old woman asking him all about how his recovery had gone, how his burns were. And, the whole time, crawling around our legs, was the little girl, born the year before—as Xian told me, half-smiling, she had guessed right, and their little girl, born under the full moon, was named Yue. She had a bright smile, and the bluest eyes that I had ever seen, and was incredibly interested in the cloth of Amon's socks, following him around with the doggedness that only a newly-crawling child can have.

 

That evening we spent in their company, enjoying a good meal, even Amon partaking with his mask pressed up even if he did keep his face hidden by tucking it in toward his chest (they might have seen him before the burns had scarred, but he was still self-conscious) and afterward, once Yue was put to bed and the moon started to rise, we sat around the sitting room in the house and shared a cool plum wine, Amon sitting just close enough that our toes could press together, and although both Nan and Xian, with their own engagement pendants, had noticed the one he had given me, neither of them said anything. 

 

It was a fine evening, full of good conversation and good food and good company, and it was up toward the height of moonrise that we bid our farewell to return home in the darkness to make it home in time for the morning watering the next day, and we were sent on our way with the ostritchhorse that we had bought from them, Toloak explaining that they had gotten two more with the money I had paid him with and kept them stabled behind the house, with some of Xian's oats and a homemade loaf of bread, and our promise that we would come visiting again, and sooner. Nan thanked Amon for how well he had taken care of Mako and he thanked her for saving his life, and we left again in the darkness, Rentu tied to Vaya and squawking when she jerked him along, impatient, Amon still sitting behind me, leaning on my shoulder.

 

We talked quietly all the way home, and I could hear the smile in Amon's voice in every word he said. His hands on my waist were warm, and the stone of the pendant against the hollow of my neck was chilled slightly by the air, a heavy, tangible reminder of his love for me.

 

When I looked over my shoulder to see him, his eyes were watching me back, and every unsaid word and smile in them spoke of absolute, unfaltering, unfailing love.

 

 

 

An unseasonably late frost in early May had nearly killed our first few buds, but I had saved them through quick application of some inventive Waterbending, and Lieu had kissed my mask in triumph right there in the fields before I pushed him away, half-laughing. It was hard to remember that we hadn't always lived this way, comfortable and utterly happy in our shared, perfect life. That night, as we lay wrapped side-by-side in bed, his nose pressed against the nape of my neck and his hands wrapped around my waist, telling me about something that had happened when he went into the general store that afternoon involving the next neighbour down the way and an eight-bladed Future Industries tractor that was being shown off, that we fell quiet.

 

Everything felt right, and perfect, and whole. Even me, as broken as I was. Lieu had glued me back together in ways that I could never have done all on my own, and even given the hairline cracks makeshift caulking. I wrapped my hands on top of his, laced our fingers together, and turned my head more into his, pressed back into his arms, and smiled into the pillow.

 

His engagement necklace was on the bedside table, with the lotion that we used for my burns (and the lotion that we used for other things) and my mask, and I couldn't imagine a better assortment of items to lay there. We would probably never have any ceremony of our wedding, but that didn't make it any less true. Lieu had wedded and bedded me long ago, even if we had never made it true between us until now.

 

"You know," Lieu said finally into the back of my neck, stretching his head forward to rest his chin on the top of my shoulder. I could see his nose and one eye if I looked as far to my side as I could. "I've been thinking lately."

 

"About what?" Turning in his arms so that we were facing one another, I pressed my hands to his chest, dark skin and fractured burn scars pressed against his own paler complexion, tanned and goldened from a year working in the fields, with the scatted scars from years of fighting etched into it—the fractal down one arm, from when he had taken a bolt of lightning for me. Plenty of thin scars from cuts and stabs, a starburst from a pressure injury from a rather irate Earthbender who had been left handed when we hadn't expected it, and there, on his side, the single puckered puncture scar from when I had used my Bloodbending for the only good thing it had ever done. My fingers curled over his collarbones and he shifted, hands wrapped around my hipbones, his nose pressed to the bridge of where mine had been, since there was nothing else there for him to press it to.

 

"About the Equalists." My breath caught in my throat, just like it did every time that name was mentioned, whether I wanted it to or not.

 

"What about them?" I said it cautiously, almost afraid of what he was going to say next, and it must have shown in my expression, because Lieu smiled reassuringly at me.

 

"Nothing bad, I promise. I was thinking—there were probably a thousand thousand different ways we could have lived our lives, where we could have not met, or where we could have stayed together a few years and grown apart, or entirely different paths for us could have come up. Lives where you or I could have died somewhere along the way, or at the end of the story." He didn't have to give any more details than that for me to know what he meant. "And I realised something," he tilted his head up to press a kiss between where my eyebrows had been before, and settled there, his breath warm against the burns on my skin, the limited nerve endings sparking as I felt him exhale. He was looking past the top of my head into the room. "As awful as some things have been—as much as your life would be easier if you weren't burned, as bad as things were for a while, as angry as I was…as hurt as you were. As much as we screwed up…that all led us here." He moved back so that our eyes could meet, and pulled one hand from my hip to reach up, brush my remaining hair out of my face, to cup my cheek with his palm.

 

The lines beside his eyes crinkled more as he grinned. "If you asked me what I would change, I would go back and do it all over again, just to be here with you."

 

My heart felt tight in my chest, and after a moment, I slid my arms around my lover's chest and pulled him close, pillowed my head on his shoulder, and closed my eyes. He smelled like love and safety, like shared sheets and home.

 

"I could do without the horrific scarring," I confessed, and Lieu snorted.

 

"I think you look fine,"

 

"If just for practicality and my own health," I added, and for the first time, I realised it was true. Burns, even if they had been lies, had been part of me for so long, I didn't even find it hard now to learn to live with real ones. "But…I think if it would get us here, I would do it all over again too. Maybe without the part where I almost killed you."

 

"No, keep that part. That was the part that ended up fixing us in the end." There was something in my eye, or my throat, or my chest. It felt a little bit like I was an old vase that had been glued together too many times, feeling a chip come loose again.

 

I hugged Lieu tighter, breathed a quiet, aching breath into his chest.

 

"I love you," I whispered against his skin, "Like I could never even say."

 

"I know," he replied, and I realised—

 

It wasn't a chip in me that was hurting. I had just forgotten what it felt like to be whole again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A great many thanks to a great many people on Tumblr—to the SS Lieumon crowd, who supported me every step of the way. To theslowestdrawfag, without whom this would not exist, for it is her idea and her creation. To lordoftea, who edited, complained, worldbuilt, and advised me as best he could. To cobaltserket, who found me chapter quotes, and to theeightschronicle, who gave me invaluable medical advice.
> 
> And to everyone who reads this, thank you.


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